Stephen John Stedman

Spoiler Problems in Peace Processes

confirm a basic finding from the study of civil war termination: ”peacemaking is a risky business.”’ The greatest source of risk comes from spoilers-leaders and parties who believe that peace emerging from negotiations threatens their power, worldview, and interests, and use violence to undermine attempts to achieve it.’ By signing a peace agreement, leaders put themselves at risk from adversaries who may take advantage of a settlement, from disgruntled followers who see peace as a betrayal of key values, and from excluded parties who seek either to alter the process or to destroy it. By implementing a peace agreement, peacemakers are vulnerable to attack from those who oppose their efforts. And most important, the risks of peacemaking increase the insecurity and uncertainty of average citizens who have the most to lose if war is renewed. When spoilers succeed, as they did in Angola in 1992 and Rwanda in 1994, the results are catastrophic. In both cases, the casualties of failed peace were infinitely higher than the casualties of war. When Jonas Savimbi refused to accept the outcome of UN-monitored elections in 1992 and plunged Angola back into civil war, approximately 300,000 people died. When Hutu extremists in Rwanda rejected the Arusha Peace Accords in 1994 and launched a campaign of genocide, over 1 million Rwandans died in less than three month^.^

Botswana : the political economy of democratic development

Part 1 Botswanas Path to Democratic Development: Macroeconomic Policymaking and Development - Botswana in Comparative Perspective, S.Lewis Explaining Botswanas Relative State Success, S.Morrison Botswana As Hostage to High Politics - 20th Century Conflict with South Africa and Zimbabwe, R.Dale International Influences on Botswanas Democracy, P.Molutsi. Part 2 Current Problems and Predicaments: The Stalled Development of Citizen Participation in Botswana, J.Holm Bureaucracy and Democracy in Botswana - What Type of a Relationship?, G.Somolokae Human Resource Development in Botswana - A Shrinking Political Issue, J.C.N.Mentz and L.Picard Foreign Policy Decisionmaking in an African Democracy, J.Zaffiro Governance and Environment in Botswana - The Ecological Price of Stability, R.Yeager. Part 3 Botswana in the 1990s: Changing South Africa - What Role for Botswana?, O.Claus and B.Weimer Critical Perspectives on the Political Economy of Botswana as a Model for Development, J.Parson.

Peace operations: From short‐term to long‐term commitment

By developing a strategic approach to the implementation of peace accords in civil war, the United Nations can better the odds for ending a war and fostering development in the long run. Recent attempts at implementation have suffered from recurring difficulties: incomplete, vague and expedient agreements; lack of coordination between mediators and those who have to implement an agreement; lack of co‐ordination between implementing agencies; lack of sustained attention by the international community; incomplete fulfilment of agreements by warring parties; and the presence of ‘spoilers’ who seek to destroy any incipient peace. To overcome these difficulties, the UN must encourage the parties to choose political, cultural, social and economic security‐building measures during the negotiation phase and systematically apply confidence‐building measures to the military components of implementation. This demands a reconsideration of peace making in a civil war to include a long‐term international commitment to ...

The New Is Not Yet Born : Conflict Resolution in Southern Africa

The April 1994 election, in which black and white South Africans vote for the first time for a non-racial government, marks one of the many recent profound changes in Southern Africa. The authors of this book recount how Southern Africa has long endured costly, violent domestic and interstate conflicts, often complicated and intensified by external interventions and interests. They also analyze the various attempts to resolve Southern Africas conflicts. They suggest that the democratic transition in Southern Africa opens the possibility to create a secure Southern Africa, but they also note that past-conflict legacies and new unanticipated conflicts could stand in the way.

Africa in the Twenty-First Century

As the world enters the twenty-first century, African states and societies are enmeshed in a process of global reordering. The terms we have used to describe contemporary African politics—“vibrant,” “fluid,” “rich,” “complex”—are especially appropriate today. Despite the economic and social problems faced by most African governments, the continent is characterized by a tremendous political vitality. Indeed, as the 1990s so forcefully demonstrated, the very difficulties that Africans have faced since independence have prompted experimentation with new political forms and directions.

Ethnicity, Class, and the State

Our political interaction approach emphasizes the complexity of the group demands that the African state faces. It assumes a constant engagement of rival interests in the contemporary political arena, an interaction among various groups mobilized to secure public resources from those in authority. These groups—based on ethnicity, region, race, gender, religion, generation, class, and so forth—may be distinct in terms of origins and appeals, but they share common features in the way they organize to engage in a dynamic interplay of conflict and collaboration. In some instances cultural communities succeed in uniting people for some of the primary purposes of existence—cultural fulfillment, belongingness, psychological and physical security, and social intercourse; where this occurs, such communities can play an important role in gathering group members around an intermediary for the purpose of making collective demands on state decisionmakers. The range of these demands varies considerably. Not only do group representatives lay claim to a full share of public political power, protections, economic resources, administrative positions, contracts, awards, and scholarships but they make appeals, sometimes more conflict-laden in their effects, for broad grants of political autonomy and independence.

South Africa: The Possibilities and Limits of Transforming State and Society

On April 26, 1994, South Africans voted in the first nonracial universal suffrage election in the country’s violent history and elected Nelson Mandela president. The election culminated decades of popular struggle against apartheid, a system of racial domination whose hallmarks were racial violence and privilege. In 1960, Africa’s “year of independence” in much of the continent, the ruling government in South Africa banned the leading nationalist movement, the African National Congress (ANC). Not until thirty years later would the government lift its ban on the ANC and other antiapartheid political parties. The intervening period saw recurrent outbursts of violent protest and ever growing black political mobilization within the country, and increasing international pressure against apartheid in the rest of the world. Mandela’s election brought one chapter in the history of Africa to a close—the era of formal white domination of African states—and began a new era in South Africa’s history: an era faced with the challenge of transforming a racist, ethnically dominated state and society into a nonracial democracy.

State Institutions and the Organization of the Public Arena

In the first part of this book we examine the types of organizations devised by Africans at various levels to mobilize themselves, their allies, and their resources to deal with their constantly changing surroundings, and we introduce the basic concepts of contemporary African politics: state, social groups, ethnicity, and class. Who are the main political actors in Africa today? What interests do they have and what resources do they control? How are they structured? In what ways are they connected? And what are their capabilities and their weaknesses? In Chapter 2 we focus on the consolidation and alteration of formal government institutions, and in Chapter 3 we deal with the structures of social and economic life. Because state and society are analytical categories that intersect and frequently overlap, Chapter 4 is devoted specifically to the investigation of the many forms of state-society relations that have evolved in Africa in the postcolonial period. These relationships provide the basis for understanding how decisions are made, why certain policies are adopted, how they affect various groups, and with what results.

Regimes in Independent Africa

Political processes—the ways in which political rules, norms, methods, and modes of interaction are established, maintained, and change—have evolved in Africa in a historical environment of economic adversity and external dependence and in a structural context of fragility and diffusion. Patterns of political conduct determine priorities, preoccupations, and possibilities. Development strategies and foreign policies (the substance of politics) are therefore the concrete outcome of how politics are conceived, practiced, and transformed. The dynamics of politics in Africa is about the procedures and mechanisms by which state agencies and social groups cooperate, conflict, intertwine, and consequently act.

The International Regime for Treating Civil War, 1988–2017

The post–Cold War international order has promoted a “standard treatment” for civil wars involving the use of mediation to end conflicts and the deployment of peacekeeping forces to implement the resulting settlements. The United Nations has played a leading role in applying this standard treatment, which enjoys broad international support. By contrast, Western efforts to promote more robust humanitarian intervention as a standard response to civil wars remains controversial. While effective in relatively permissive postconflict environments, international mediation and peacekeeping efforts have proved insufficient to resolve harder cases of civil war, such as those in South Sudan and Syria. The UN has struggled to make the standard treatment work where governments refuse to cooperate or low-level violence is endemic. Growing major-power tensions could now undermine the post–Cold War regime for the treatment of civil wars, which, for all its faults, has made a significant contribution to international order.