This project is being conducted as part of the 2023/2024 Swiss Government Excellence Postdoctoral fellowship funded by the Federal Commission for Scholarships for Foreign Students (FCS). It argues for the rethinking of liberal peacebuilding approaches within the broader literature of peace and conflict studies. The liberal peacebuilding approach is based on the assumption that conflicts can be resolved through reforms in the market, adopting liberal democratic political practices and formulation/adoption of norms, doctrines and institutions. While these measures have had some positive impact in some conflict environments, they seem to trigger a crisis and reproduction of violence in other settings. Thus, the liberal peacebuilding model has come under heavy critique for its practical limitations in complex, protracted, and fragmented conflict settings. The project focuses on three case studies namely the conflict in South Sudan, Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to illustrate that interventions premised on the liberal peacebuilding model to mitigate conflict and alleviate humanitarian crises have largely been ineffective.
The project puts forth two core arguments. Firstly, that at the centre of conflicts in the three countries, are hyper local causes and drivers, yet, previous intervention epitomised by the internationally mediated peace agreements, have tended to ignore the hyper locality aspect of the conflict. Secondly, whereas international civil society organisations have shifted attention and resources to the sub-national level, such interventions have largely been driven by outsider agency at the expense of local agency which is emblematic of community preferences for the form of intervention as well as the leverage of indigenous social systems and structures for peace. The project hopes to reinforce the need for conflict-sensitive thinking in the designing and implementation of peace interventions at the local levels to positively transform the conflict landscape in the DRC, South Sudan and Ethiopia. Within the framework of this project, Dr. Nyadera has given a seminar lecture at CCDP and will disseminate the findings of the project through journal publications.