This paper argues that peacebuilding programming has prioritised order above other social values, which has resulted in an emphasis on building robust state structures as the way to instil stability within a society. This trend exposes the concept and practice of peacebuilding to a range of dilemmas, particularly around the role of violence in state formation and the problematics of statehood in Africa.
Due to the inherent contradictions between peacebuilding and statebuilding, the former conceptually fails to provide a framework for prioritising interventions. The focus on statebuilding has in many ways overtaken parts of the peacebuilding agenda, resulting in the most transformational of peacebuilding work being conducted at grassroots levels focusing on inter-personal and intercommunal security, without challenging the national and global systems that enable and regulate violence.
This paper maps out some of the key trends and challenges of peacebuilding in Africa. It adopts a macro-approach pointing to high-level dynamics and general trends. There is an increasing gap between the transformational community-based processes of peacebuilding and the formalised technical processes of statebuilding, and there are few efforts to synthesise knowledge about local-level conflict transformation with elite-level research on peacebuilding.
On the one hand, peacebuilding has been conflated with statebuilding, but on the other, programmatically peacebuilding has probably not engaged enough in the politics of change, political stabilisation and the nature of elite compacts to be critically relevant to the state formation project. Bridging the divides between the internal and external dilemmas of peacebuilding is essential to creating sustainable positive change in local violence reduction.
