The Centre for Gender and Africa Studies at the University of the Free State’s Qwaqwa Campus hereby invites you to the Africa Day Memorial Lecture titled: Peacebuilding in Africa: Challenges, trends, and futures to be presented by Prof Ismail Rashid. 

Venue: E0014 Education Building, Qwaqwa Campus

What would it take to build durable and meaningful peace in postcolonial Africa? Since the 1960s, African countries have struggled with overcoming the encumbrances of European colonialism, holding together the fissiparous interests and forces within their territories, containing the destabilising influences and pressures of external actors, and establishing stable and peaceful environments for the majority of their people to fulfil their needs and aspirations. This struggle has been made even harder by the intense political conflicts and large‑scale social violence that many African countries have experienced, especially in the wake of the collapse of the bipolar Cold War world order from the 1990s onwards.

The shift from outdated ideas and notions of peacekeeping and peacemaking to those newer ones of peacebuilding and humanitarianism offered new possibilities for conflict‑affected African countries to establish more stable and durable polities. However, the implementation and outcomes of this newer peacebuilding process in Africa have turned out to be of limited efficacy and disappointing. African scholars and activists have been rightly critical of the neoliberal ideological considerations that have shaped the peacebuilding process and practices in many African countries. Instead, they have offered insightful methodological, interpretative, and policy approaches that are worth engaging by all invested in building stable and durable peace in Africa.

About Prof Rashid

Ismail Rashid is the Marion Musser Lloyd 32’ Professor of History and International Relations at Vassar College. He received his PhD in African History from McGill University. He has written extensively on anticolonial resistance, public health, youth and conflict, and peacebuilding in Africa. Among his recent publications are West Africa’s Security Challenges (2004 with Adekeye Adebajo), The Paradoxes of History and Memory in Postcolonial Sierra Leone (2013) (with Sylvia Ojukutu‑Macauley), Understanding West Africa’s Ebola Epidemic꞉ Towards a Political Economy (2017) (with Ibrahim Abdullah) and Researching Peacebuilding in Africa (2020) (with Amy Niang) and co‑editing of a special issue of African Conflict and Peacebuilding Review (2023) titled ‘Twenty Years after the Sierra Leone Civil War.’

For queries, contact Rose Nthoroane on +27 58 718 5349 or NthoroaneRF@ufs.ac.za.

Please note that the lecture will be livestreamed here as well for the convenience of those who will not be able to attend.

More information here.