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.

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