Routledge Handbook of African Peacebuilding

Bruno Charbonneau is Full Professor of International Studies and Director of the Centre for Security and Crisis Governance (CRITIC) at Canada’s Royal Military College Saint-Jean. Maxime Ricard is West Africa Researcher at the Institute for Strategic Research (Institut de recherche stratégique de l’École militaire, IRSEM, France) and holds a PhD in political science from Université du Québec à Montréal. He is also Associate Researcher at the Centre FrancoPaix of the Raoul-Dandurand Chair in Canada.

• Introduction: Whose Peacebuilding? Power, Politics, Practices Part I: Institutions 1. From Peacekeeping to Peacebuilding: Towards a UN Peace Continuum 2. The United Nations and the African Union: Partners or Rivals in Peace Operations? 3. Peacebuilding via Security Sector Reform and Governance? The Case of West Africa 4. Preventing Conflict-Induced Forced Displacement in Africa: UNHCR, the AU and the Rhetoric and Realities of 'Root Causes' Part II: Themes and Debates 5. African Mediation in High-Intensity Conflict: How African? 6. Justice and Reconciliation in Africa: The Emergence of the African Union Transitional Justice Policy 7. The Politics of Knowledge and an African Transitional Justice: Analysing Africa as a Constitutive Outside 8. Local Peacebuilding: The Reflexive Encounter Between a Subaltern View and a Practitioner in Côte D’Ivoire 9. Women, Gender and Peacebuilding in Africa 10. Development and Peacebuilding 11. Peacebuilding and Democracy in Africa 12. The Climate Crisis and Its Challenges for African Peacebuilding Part III: Case Studies 13. Peace by Delegation? The G5 Sahel’s Quest to Build Sustainable Peace 14. Counterinsurgency and Peacebuilding in Somalia and Mali 15. Peacebuilding in The Gambia: Sustaining the Gains and Addressing Potential Threats to the Process 16. The Politics of Transitional Justice and Peacemaking in a Non-Transition Context: The Case of South Sudan 17. Peacebuilding in Guinea-Bissau: Challenges and the Way Forward to Sustaining Peace and Security 18. Stability for Whom and for What? The Ivorian Peacebuilding Experience Under Alassane Ouattara Conclusion: African Peacebuilding for Whom and What? Bringing the People Back In

This handbook as a whole will be of greatest interest to scholars who study peacebuilding processes in Africa. Individual chapters could be valuable sources of insight and citation for scholars working on specific subjects, whether certain tasks (e.g. security sector reform) or the countries that are the foci of case studies. I am sceptical that Western policy makers and many UN officials will respond positively to the critiques of their efforts that run throughout the handbook. This is not to say that criticisms from the Global South perspective are invalid, but they run counter to orientations that still reflect the liberal model of peacebuilding. -- Paul F. Diehl, Independent Scholar