Conflict and Security in the Developing World – serie

Indigenous Conflict Management Strategies in West Africa:Beyond Right and Wrong expands the discourse on indigenous knowledge. With several examples and case histories, the work defines, characterizes, and explains indigenous conflict management strategies in West Africa, particularly in Ghana, Nigeria, and Cameroon. The book critically evaluates indigenous conflict management strategies with a view to determining their effectiveness in the context of the societies’ history and culture, and the relevance and adaptability of these strategies in contemporary contexts. This book takes a scholarly approach, avoiding romanticizing or idealizing indigenous conflict management strategies in West Africa. It advocates a set of mechanisms by which the best elements of indigenous knowledge and skills in conflict management may be deployed to settle contemporary disputes, and made portable for adoption and adaptation by other complex societies in the region and beyond.

Africa Nations have contributed to peace operations in conflict zones across the world since the deployment of the United Nations Operations in the Congo in 1960. This has placed Africa as a major stakeholder in the maintenance of peace and security. For over fifty years Ghana has earned the international reputation as one of the largest and consistent Troop Contributing Country in United Nations mandated peace operations. While Ghana has long been an active contributor to peace operations, there are few or no comparative studies that systematically analyze the actual roles played by troops in many of the different conflict context where they have served. This book therefore, focuses on a comparison of two peace operations undertaken by the forces of an African Nation in two different missions in Lebanon and Liberia.

This book highlights the complexities of nationalism and the struggles of different groups left unaddressed within the nation-states of a postcolonial world. The central question is what happened to the worldly and radical visions of freedom, liberty, and equality that animated intellectual activists and policy makers from Woodrow Wilson in the 1920s? This book analyzes the outcome of lumping disparate groups of people together under one nation-state and holding them together against the knowledge of the incompatibility theory of plural states. In a world of arbitrarily and colonially mapped sovereign states, groups, and nations with distinctive histories and cultures trapped within the borders of sovereign states want the freedom to decide their own destinies. This book challenges, deconstructs, and decolonizes Western epistemologies related to postcolonial state formation and maintenance. In examining the freedom concept that no human group ought to be determining the independence of other human groups, this book constructs an alternative conceptualization of nations and peoples’ rights in the twenty-first century, in which radical hopes and global dreams are recognized as central to internal nationalism struggles.

This collection book provides a critical, inter-disciplinary exploration of the relationship between religion, conflict, violence, and tolerance from local-global perspectives. It focuses mainly on theoretical issues and approaches with contrasting case studies drawn from Africa, Europe, the Middle East, North America, and South Asia.

The relationship between religion and conflict has generated considerable academic and political debate. Although the majority of religions and spiritual traditions are replete with wisdom that propagates a broader unity among human beings, these same examples have been used to legitimize hatred and fear. While some studies claim that religion facilitates peacebuilding, reconciliation, and healing, others argue that religion exacerbates hostility, instigates vengeance-seeking behaviors, and heightens conflict. But religion does not act by itself, human beings are responsible for acts of peace or conflict, of division or reconciliation, in the name of religion. This book addresses these rather complex issues from the perspective of reconciliation, or atonement, to advance both the frontiers of knowledge and the global search for alternative paths to peace. The contributions in the volume focus in three areas: (1) Reconciling Religious Conflicts, (2) Reconciling Conflict through Religion, and (3) Religious Reconciliations. In each of these sections scholars, practitioners, and religious leaders address specific examples that highlight the complex intersections of religious practices with global conflict and reconciliation efforts. This informative and provocative book is relevant for students and faculty in peace and conflict studies, religious studies, humanities, social sciences, and provides insights useful to practitioners and professionals working in peacebuilding and international development seeking to promote effective resolution and reconciliation efforts.

The plight of citizens being victims of violence, politicking, power tussle, inconsistent government policies, and approaches to resolving the protracted conflict between Offa and Erinle (also known as Erin-Ile) from independence to now defines and explains the intractability between these two groups. Understanding Protraction and the Intractability of Conflicts: The Case of Offa and Erinle, Kwara State, Nigeria, by Yakub Jide Yahaya, examines a sensitive and problematic socio-cultural aspect of intra-ethnic conflicts where two promising communities have ignored trade development and urbanization and settled for pettiness and violence. The book searches into the unique area of intra-ethnic conflicts while providing a background for understanding this conflict, highlighting the nuances ignored in the discussion. Above all, it highlights the underlying issues called 'land conflict' across Nigeria and Africa.

Rising sectarian tensions, deepening poverty, and growing unemployment have been intertwined and compounded with the COVID-19 pandemic and corruption, to create a conducive environment for instability in Lebanon. Drawing on a survey-based research design, Isaac E. Andakian tests hopes and fears, social dominance orientation, and levels of social cohesion among various sectarian groups to gauge their responses to crises. Lebanon's Year of Crisis (2019-2020): Unity in Adversity explores how shared experiences of four great shocks—the 2019 financial crisis, the October 2019 uprising, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Beirut Port Explosion of August 4, 2020— shape respondents' sectarian, political, and demographic identities. Andakian looks to the future to assess whether conflict, or even the resumption of civil war, stemming from Hezbollah's constant threats to use its military capabilities domestically, can be anticipated.

Nigeria: History, Society, and Social Change in the Twenty-first Century explores the history of Nigeria from multiple perspectives. It offers a comprehensive analysis and interpretation of social change in the country before and since independence in 1960. Nigeria has undergone numerous changes: from colonialism to independence; from civilian to military governments and back to civilian rule of the Fourth Republic; from the adoption of a regional constitution in 1946, a federal constitution in 1954, and a Presidential Constitution in 1979. The book gives visibility to women, women’s organizations, and other until now voiceless minorities. What factors promoted social change? Who were/are prime movers for social change? How did powerful politicians, business interests, religious leaders, and the traditional and social media contribute to promoting or resisting social change? Of interest is the minority constitution proposed in 1976 which provided an alternative future for Nigeria. What would Nigeria’s sociopolitical and economic future had been if this constitutional change had been made in the 1970s?