This third contribution to our symposium on Governing the Feminist Peace comes from Mohamed Sesay. Mohamed is Associate Professor and Coordinator of the African Studies Program in the Department of Social Science at York University in Canada. His research and teaching interests are in development, transitional justice, international criminal justice, rule of law, customary justice, peacebuilding, and post-conflict reconstruction particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. He is co-investigator for a UKRI GCRF project titled Land Policy, Gender Justice, and Dual Legal Systems. Earlier posts in the symposium can be found here and here.

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Let me start by a somewhat unfamiliar account of conflict and violence in Africa. After almost a century of European colonization, anti-colonial struggles resulted in the political independence of African states, particularly in the post-World War II era. However, the end of direct colonialism did not amount to the decolonization of the structures established by violent colonial administrations. Rather, what followed the attainment of juridical-political independence is what postcolonial scholars call coloniality, i.e., “various colonial-like power relations existing today in zones that experienced direct colonialism” (Quijano 2007: 170). Independent nations in Africa did not effect any major ideological or structural break with the colonial state and all they did “was to expand the former colonial administrative and economic infrastructures” (Ogot and Ochieng 1995: XIII). Just as colonial governments relied on coercive structures to rule over their colonies, so too did their African successors embrace violence and militarism as the mechanism to shore up legitimacy deficits in the modern state. In the transition to the postcolony, “the predatory paradigm of governance was conveniently adopted…by the local political, economic, civil, and military elites” (Yusuf 2018:257). This underlining post/neocolonial condition as well as the paradigm of violence it engenders (Ndluvo-Gatsheni 2012, 2015) has remained not only at the root of many conflicts in Africa but also central to what makes peace elusive for ordinary Africans (Zondi 2017). Thus, Fonken Achankeng notes:

If the causes and consequences of the conflicts have their roots in colonialism, the process of decolonization and state formation and the ensuing crisis of nation-building, then any attempt to resolve the conflict must also transcend the concepts of new institutions that will increase participation, legitimacy, and redistribution, and good governance recipes to also address the root causes of the problem (Achankeng 2013:14)

To what extent does the feminist peace, promised by the Women Peace and Security agenda, account for this historical and contemporary reality of conflict and violence in Africa is the question I had in mind as I read Governing the Feminist Peace by Paul Kirby and Laura J. Shepherd. As the authors aptly note, Africa is a central part of the WPS ecosystem, with the Maputo Protocol to the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa, the Solemn Declaration on Gender Equality, and the Dar-es-Salaam Declaration on Peace, Security, Democracy, and Development becoming the earliest policymaking moves to institutionalize Resolution 1325 outside the United Nations. In addition to 32 national action plans (NAPs) adopted by African governments, regional organizations in Africa account for about half of the policy documents issued beyond the UN and its member states as the authors report. Indeed, this massive policy commitment makes Africa a “terrain of reproduction and contestation” of WPS beyond the “narrow diffusionist model” (p. 69) and I appreciate the authors’ efforts to represent Africa from this critical perspective. I cannot agree more that in the African context, policymaking moves such as NAPs can become a “key part of governing,” functioning as “a way of stultifying feminist peace, or interloping WPS into the machinery of the state” (p.119). Unlike women’s rights groups and activists who may contribute to WPS as a means to challenge domestic patriarchy, when the political class in Africa is at the forefront of promoting an agenda aimed at challenging their power, it is often a governing strategy to hijack its radical transformative mission.

That said, the post/neocolonial condition in Africa has not received the due attention it deserves in this book.

The authors transcend the usual liberal problem-solving critique against governance feminism to centre imperial and racialized power in WPS. They argue that “coloniality and indigeneity are intrinsic to considerations of gendered insecurity if for no reason other than the fact that contemporary conflicts are the outgrowth of historical and contemporary colonial violence” (p.139). They add that “the failure, or active refusal, to recognize the harms of colonization perpetuates a form of ongoing structural violence against indigenous peoples, who in many contemporary liberal democracies are still experiencing continuity of marginalization and oppression” (p.139). But when it comes to African, this “careful investigation of how racialized power operates within the ecosystem” (150) seems to have been blunted by “one of the most powerful myths of the 20th century,” i.e., “the belief that the end of direct colonial administrations amounted to decolonization” (Grosfoguel 2007:219). Where Africa is included in this interrogation of race and coloniality in WPS, it appears to be an extension of the experiences of indigenous peoples in settler states and other colonial contexts rather than an analytically distinct structural context.

The post/neocolonial condition in Africa poses a particular challenge to feminist peace not because of the lack of alternative ideas to the “militarized and masculinized presumptions of conventional security institutions” (p.143), many based on the historical struggles and activism of women within and outside the WPS. It poses a significant challenge because a just and equitable future cannot emerge from unjust post/neocolonial structures that have outlived the formal end of colonialism (Achankeng 2013). In Africa, the core of the problem is that “structural continuity” from the unjust past “has locked down the prospects of justice and reforms as an integral part of the governance complex” (Yusuf 2018:257). As in the colonial times when traditional and indigenous systems were reinvented to legitimize the colonial state, the alternative ideas advanced and embraced by the ruling elites might be colonial versions of tradition that lack legitimacy. Unlike indigenous women in present-day settler colonies whose voices even need permission from the settler state to be heard, the colonial logic in Africa is one that proclaims radical inclusion only to be “largely captured and neutralized by the agency of colonial-style governance” (Yusuf 2018: 258). Here, unlike other former colonized regions, the intractable problem is not only neocolonial economic relations and violent interventions by former colonial powers, the United States, new rising powers, multinational companies, and private actors whose strategic interests do not always align with gender justice and feminist peace. It is also, and more notably, that those who inherited the colonial governance paradigm are invested in preserving it, allowing only the domestication of feminist participation, protection, and prevention that does not dismantle the system at the fundamental level of power structures.

The greatest concern for me then becomes the disconnect between the WPS agenda and decolonization in Africa. What sets Africa apart from other regions in the world is its quest for decolonial peace to “deal with the colonial continuities in the nature of the inherited state, with its underlying paradigm of war and violence, its colonizer model of the world, and its colonial political economy” (Zondi 2017:106). Africa has experimented a number of peacemaking and peacebuilding frameworks, from the global liberal peace model to local alternatives, “with limited success due to the failure to fundamentally transform the inherited postcolonial state, society, and politics” (Zondi 2017:105). Without a return to the incomplete project of decolonizing inherited domestic structures and neocolonial relations with the global economy, the WPS agenda remains in flux between vitality and failure. From this perspective, Governing the Feminist Peace might have been analytically different both in terms of the underlying problem and the future of feminist peace in Africa. One would have seen a fundamental structural, instead of a policy agenda, problem; namely, that transformative agendas like WPS do not go very far if the neocolonial structures in which they emerged have not been effectively dismantled. Feminist peace must be part of the unsettled and largely disappeared conversation about what the ruling class in Africa did with the systems of governance that colonialists bequeathed to them. The future of this peace is not merely about how to make these systems more inclusive of women nor how to deploy them to protect and defend women’s rights. The future in this structural setting is about how to decolonize these systems so that violence and war is delegitimized as a means of governance, a question that seems to be deflected by those governing feminist peace.

References

Achankeng, Fonkem. “Conflict and conflict resolution in Africa: Engaging the colonial factor.” African Journal on Conflict Resolution 13.2 (2013): 11-38.

Grosfoguel, Ramón. “The epistemic decolonial turn: Beyond political-economy paradigms.” Cultural Studies 21.2-3 (2007): 211-223.

Ndlovu‐Gatsheni, Sabelo J. “Decoloniality as the future of Africa.” History Compass 13.10 (2015): 485-496.

Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Sabelo J. “Fiftieth Anniversary of Decolonisation in Africa: a moment of celebration or critical reflection?.” Third World Quarterly 33.1 (2012): 71-89.

Ogot, Bethwell A., and William Robert Ochieng, eds. Decolonization & independence in Kenya, 1940-93. Ohio State University Press, 1995.

Quijano, Aníbal. “Coloniality and modernity/rationality.” Cultural Studies 21.2-3 (2007): 168-178.

Yusuf, Hakeem O. “Colonialism and the dilemmas of transitional justice in Nigeria.” International Journal of Transitional Justice 12.2 (2018): 257-276.

Zondi, Siphamandla. “African Union approaches to peacebuilding: Efforts at shifting the continent towards decolonial peace.” African Journal on Conflict Resolution 17.1 (2017): 105-131.