Last month, 600 soldiers from the Forces Armées des Forces Nouvelles, a coalition of rebel movements in Côte d’Ivoire, laid down their arms as part of a process to disarm rebel groups and integrate them into the national army. In an e-mail interview, I. William Zartman, professor emeritus at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, discusses ongoing conflict management in Côte d’Ivoire. WPR: What is the current status of post-conflict reconciliation in Côte d’Ivoire? I. William Zartman: Côte d’Ivoire has had a conflict management, not a conflict resolution, situation for the last three years, in that violence has [...]
When hundreds of thousands of Darfuri refugees flooded across the Chad-Sudan border in 2003, fleeing a campaign of ethnic cleansing orchestrated by the Sudanese government and its militia proxies, the U.N. and various aid groups raced to help. Humanitarian workers built a vast and sophisticated network of refugee camps to house as many as 300,000 people. The European Union and, later, the U.N. deployed peacekeepers to protect the camps. By 2008, the refugee camps in eastern Chad had become a self-contained society, one of the biggest and seemingly most permanent in all the world. It was also a major reason [...]
For several decades, a number of factors in Africa — including ideological differences among the continent’s young states, the unfinished nature of its liberation, and profound external, non-African interference — prevented any meaningful regional cooperation in the field of peace and security. But with the end of the Cold War, the concomitant proliferation of conflicts throughout the continent, and Africa’s sudden marginalization in world affairs, the states of Africa were galvanized into regional security cooperation in the late 1990s. Since then, much has been achieved. Regional organizations like the Southern African Development Community (SADC), the Economic Community of West African [...]
