ACCORD’s Research Unit will host an experts’ workshop on ‘Peace Agreements in Southern Africa’ from 3-5 May 2006 at the Burgers Park Hotel, Pretoria. The workshop will host peace processes facilitators and mediators as well as diplomats, scholars, researchers, and policy makers. Institutions represented will range from governments, academic institutions to civil society organisations.
The workshop will evaluate peace processes that have taken place in four countries namely Angola, Lesotho, Mozambique and the Union of Comoros. The countries were chosen because they not only had civil conflict and acrimonious and externally mediated peace processes, but the processes culminated in peace agreements. The objectives of this workshop include inter alia:
- To identify, explore and highlight key peace agreement issues in Southern Africa and review, analyse and interrogate these issues;
- To identify determinants of successful peace agreements in Southern Africa, and recommend possible approaches to improve the design and practice of peace agreements’ implementation, with a view to inform the on-going and future peace processes in Africa;
- To identify the challenges hampering successful peace agreements’ implementation in Southern Africa, and recommend appropriate interventions;
- To identify low-cost, high-pay-off opportunities for linking short term peace agreement implementations to long-term peace building processes.
