This paper considers how community-led peace initiatives become drivers of economic development, infrastructure improvement and service delivery that are critical to peace and stability. It examines how grassroots peacebuilding, particularly through Local Peace Committees (LPCs) established by the Ecumenical Church Leaders Forum (ECLF), has contributed to post-conflict development and social stability in the Matabeleland region of Zimbabwe. The role of LPCs in facilitating community projects, restoring trust in leadership and promoting inclusive participation in development planning is assessed with the aim of contributing to the broader African debates on how locally driven development can anchor sustainable peace and stability, especially in the absence of strong state intervention. The paper draws on interviews with ECLF staff and community members from Matabeleland to assess how these efforts are creating tangible peace dividends and helping to stabilise a region marked by a history of unresolved conflict following the Gukurahundi atrocities and where a sense of neglect by central government is alive and well. The results show that LPCs are effective community structures that facilitate development by promoting social cohesion and that the strength of the LPCs lies in the fact that they are community-driven initiatives.
This article critically examines whether the 2025 Tenth Amendment to the Constitution of Lesotho constitutes a substantive transformation in the governance of national security institutions or merely a reconfiguration of entrenched power relations. Grounded in Lesotho’s history of political instability and recurrent security-sector involvement in governance, the study adopts a qualitative doctrinal and interpretive institutional approach. It analyses the extent to which the Amendment restructures authority, strengthens oversight and promotes the depoliticisation of coercive institutions. The article finds that while the Amendment introduces important procedural reforms – particularly in relation to appointments, oversight mechanisms and professional standards – it does not fundamentally alter the concentration of authority within the executive. Consequently, the reforms align with international and regional norms on democratic security-sector governance yet fall short of achieving meaningful structural transformation. Executive dominance continues to shape the incentives that historically enabled politicisation. The article argues that constitutional reform in this context operates within the limits of constitutional engineering: enhancing formal accountability without fully addressing underlying political dynamics. Nonetheless, the Amendment provides a framework that may, over time, support the gradual consolidation of constitutionalism and institutional neutrality.
This study critically examines the persistent exclusion of women from formal peace processes. Through an in-depth case study of Liberia’s peace negotiations and analysis of global peacebuilding literature, it challenges the assumption that women are excluded because they lack the capacity to meaningfully participate. The study reveals that even when women possess significant conflict-resolution experience and leadership skills, as evidenced by Liberian women’s instrumental role in ending the civil wars in their country, they remain relegated to observer status in formal negotiations. The research also demonstrates how patriarchal power structures systematically limit women’s participation despite their demonstrated peacebuilding competencies. The paper proposes concrete policy recommendations, including enforceable participation quotas and gender-sensitive peacebuilding guidelines, to transform symbolic inclusion into substantive participation
The design of the African Standby Force (ASF) was informed by threat scenarios in Africa following the end of the Cold War. Despite being declared operationally ready in 2015, the ASF is yet to be utilised in its originally envisaged form. Instead, African states have devised measures to address threats outside the ASF's defined scenarios. We explore how deficits in the various threat response models deployed by the African Union (AU) over the years produced lessons that shaped the context for AU member states' preference for ad hoc security initiatives to address their shared security challenges. Through this, we contribute to the growing literature on ad hoc security coalitions (AHSCs) by curating relevant lessons learned from their deployment and how the AU can develop a structured framework to guide future operations. We do so by discussing two AHSCs deployed on the continent: the Coalition of States in East Africa against the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) in Uganda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Sudan, and the Multinational Joint Task Force (MNJTF) against Boko Haram in Nigeria. We elaborate on particular aspects of their operations that produce lessons and how the AU has leveraged some of these lessons.
