Peacebuilding has always been a challenging endeavor in the Horn of Africa and broadly on the continent. Relapsing into conflict is a common denominator across multiple cases. The Pretoria Agreement, GoE and TPLF, is not holding– tensions are rising and war looks inevitable unless a proactive intervention is devised from the facilitators of the agreement. The problem could be associated to the peacebuilding toolkit developed over the last three decades– conflicts have proved adaptable to the toolkit and a new framework might be needed. These fairly settled toolkit involves ceasefire, inclusive dialogue, DDR programs, transitional justice, and economic recovery packages, etc. These tools are fairly applied across several conflict situations in the HoA including Ethiopia. However, conflicts continue to reproduce with negotiations happening in different corners of the world. This insight paper interrogates the interlocking peacebuilding challenges in Africa. I argue the following four interrelated factors explain the roots of peacebuilding challenges in protracted and low-resource conflicts: the complexity of conflict causes and persistence/protractedness dynamics, the war time economies that evolve overtime, the entanglement of state institutions within the war economy, and the structural, rather than purely military or political, drivers of recruitment. These challenges are not distinct to any single conflict and context. These factors explain why protracted, low-resource insurgencies are resistant to conventional peacebuilding, and why settlements reached at the negotiating table so often fail to hold once implementation begins.
The first challenge is peace processes are typically designed around an understanding of why a conflict began: a contested election, a marginalized group’s grievance, a disputed constitutional arrangement, a breakdown in elite bargaining, etc. This is a reasonable starting point, and grievance-based diagnoses are rarely wrong as far as they go. The difficulty is that the conditions which caused a conflict to erupt are frequently not the same conditions that keep it running years later. A war that began over political exclusion can, after enough time, generate its own institutions, income streams, networks of loyalty, and local power structures that have very little to do with the original dispute and a great deal to do with the material and social advantages that continued fighting now confers on the people fighting it. A peace process built entirely around resolving the original grievance, however sincerely negotiated, addresses only half the problem. It can produce a political settlement acceptable to elites while leaving untouched the economic and organizational scaffolding that sustains violence on the ground, which is precisely why settlements negotiated at the top so often fail to translate into reduced violence at the local level.
The practical implication is that peacebuilding strategies need parallel diagnostic tracks: one that asks what a political settlement must contain to satisfy the parties’ original demands, and a separate one that asks what has to change in the conflict’s present-day economic and social organization situation for a signed agreement to actually hold. Most peace processes still run only the first track.
The second challenge follows directly from the first. Where a conflict lacks a dominant monetized natural resource, such as oil, diamonds, or gold, of the kind that financed several well-studied African insurgencies, observers sometimes assume the conflict must be more purely political and therefore, in principle, easier to resolve through negotiation. The evidence from a range of low-resource insurgencies suggests the opposite. In the absence of a lootable commodity, armed groups develop diversified, small-scale, and highly localized revenue mechanisms such as household taxation, tolls collected at checkpoints along transport routes, diversion of agricultural inputs or products, extortion of businesses, and various forms of kidnapping ranging from politically targeted detention to opportunistic criminal abduction.
The sources of income are individually modest, yet together make it durable, as armed groups do not necessarily depend on seizing a conflict commodity or strategic resource like gold mining fields or oil wells that could easily be captured or cut off by the state security forces. Instead, such armed groups rely on deeply embedded presence within communities as if they are waging war from their own backyards. Such war economy is tough to dismantle using a conventional counterinsurgency response compared to a mineral rent financed wars, as there is no single choke point to seize.
This economic durability has a broader implication for any peacebuilding efforts especially as the war economy outweighs the peace economy. Combatants will enter in the incentive calculation whenever there are negotiations or ceasefire agreements. Generous DDR packages are onetime payments, yet a functioning local taxation network, by contrast, is a recurring source of income, which offers better packages than the formal reintegration offers. Here, negotiators or facilitators undermine such economic logic of war, for some mid-level commander and ordinary fighters taking part in reintegration could mean walking away from established livelihood as such an economic loss.
This third challenge concerns the assumption embedded in any peace process designs, where there are only two parties in the conflict and in the negotiating table, i.e., the state and the non-state armed group. The position of the state is presumed as a cohesive actor seeking to restore order and the armed group demanding political change or resource access or destabilization. In protracted conflicts, such kind of distinction fade-away.
The state – the political and military wing – as the conflict persist, they began to dilute to the broader war economy with the incentives associated to it. As such, the state will no more a cohesive actor with a structured top-down command. These various actors engage in predation that sustains the insurgency or the war. Here, the war economy is attractive and lucrative in the absence of the state institutions as the conflict persists local institutions adapt to such situation regardless of the formal chain of command. They engage in extortion or kidnapping networks, or transactional relationships with local power-holders who move between state and non-state affiliation depending on circumstances. Local government officials also engage in transactional relationships requiring payments from combatants who peacefully surrender in return for protection and future legal convictions.
This has a broader implication for peace process design, the parallel state economic incentives in the war economy usually left unexamined and unaddressed by mainly focusing on the insurgent’s side of the economic incentives. This only solves half of the problem, it will eventually contribute in reproducing the conflict and sustain the violence. Institutional mechanisms aimed at monitoring the developments following the signing of the agreement should be set-up to ensure accountability and cut-off the economic incentives within the state.
This challenge comes from the assumption embedded in peacebuilding where the goal is to get existing armed groups from the war through negotiation, DDR, amnesty, vocational training, etc., not necessarily halting flow of new combatants joining the war. With the existence of large number of young people constrained with access to education and employment, joining an armed struggle is a viable option into the adulthood, income, protection, networking, etc.
Under these conditions, a settlement that successfully demobilizes an existing cohort of fighters, without altering the educational and economic landscape that produced them, leaves the underlying recruitment mechanism fully intact. New cohorts of young people facing the same constrained choices will continue to be available for remobilization, whether by remnants of the original armed group, by opportunistic actors operating under a similar banner, or by state security recruitment competing for the same limited labour pool.
This suggests that livelihood and education programming cannot be treated, as it frequently is in donor-funded stabilization frameworks, as a secondary, post-conflict complement to security operations. If constrained economic opportunity is a principal mechanism regenerating a conflict’s fighting force, addressing it functions as a security intervention in its own right, one that needs to run concurrently with, rather than after, ceasefire negotiations and demobilization programming.
Taken together, these four challenges point towards a peacebuilding architecture that current practice only partially reflects. Diagnostic work needs to separate onset causes from persistence mechanisms explicitly, rather than assuming a resolved grievance automatically translates into a resolved war economy. Reintegration incentive structures need to be bench-marked realistically against the recurring income that local extraction networks actually generates, not against a notional value of peace that may not be shared by the people whose cooperation the process depends on. Monitoring and accountability mechanisms need to extend symmetrically to state-side actors embedded in wartime economic networks, not only to the armed opposition. And economic and educational programming aimed at young people needs to be integrated into the security strategy from the outset, rather than deferred to a post-settlement reconstruction phase that may never arrive if the settlement itself does not hold.
The recurring failure of negotiated settlements in protracted, low-resource conflicts is not, in most cases, a failure of goodwill or diplomatic skill at the negotiating table. It is a structural mismatch between what peace processes are designed to resolve and what actually sustains the violence by the time a process begins. Conflicts that have run long enough to generate their own economies, their own entangled institutions, and their own recruitment pipelines require peacebuilding frameworks built to address persistence mechanisms directly, alongside, not instead of, the original political grievances. Until that adjustment is made more systematically, agreements reached on paper will keep struggling to survive contact with the economic and social realities on the ground.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this Insight reflect the perspectives of the contributor and do not necessarily represent the official position of Institute for Peace and Security Studies.
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Contributed by Yared Debebe (PhD) ARUA Fellow |