The Social Science Research Council’s African Peacebuilding Network (APN) and the Next Generation Social Sciences in Africa (Next Gen) program sponsored a panel of selective current and former fellows, “More than Local Expressions of the Global? Interrogating Emerging Patterns and Practices of Conflict, Peace and Development in Africa,” featuring presentations based on the fellows’ research findings. The panel was held during the 2024 African Studies Association (ASA) Annual Meeting in Chicago, USA, from December 12 to 14, 2024. 

Chaired by Dr. Cyril Obi, Program Director of APN and Next Gen, the panel addressed how local cases of conflict, peace, and development in Africa interact with, resist, adapt, and are shaped by global structures, norms, politics, and actors. Presenters interrogated the dominant narratives, concepts, theories, and emerging patterns of such relationships by identifying cases of local appropriation and resistance to dominant global narratives, meaning-making, and relationships to demonstrate African agency in peace, security, and development within Africa and at the global level.   

In War, Peacemaking, and the Global-Local Friction in the 2020–2022 Northern Ethiopia Conflict, Dr. Alagaw Kifle presented a study of the complex and diverse local and global actors entangled in the peacemaking process in the contested area, Raya, in the context of the Amhara-Tigray Civil War in Ethiopia. He noted that the diverse responses from local, diasporic, and multi-lateral communities to the Western actors involved in the peace agreement are to be found in their diverse interests and agendas. The diverse perspectives on the international and national actors have resulted in local and diasporic communities organizing movements to support or reject the agreement. 

Dr. Sokfa Francis John’s presentation on Digitally Offline, Globally Connected: Dynamics of Digital Peacebuilding and Localization in Africa drew on local digital and non-digital peacebuilding cases in Kenyan and Nigerian contexts. He critiqued hegemonic narratives of development as part of the analysis of the opportunities and limitations of current digital peacebuilding. The cases examined demonstrated how peacebuilders mutually constitute the local and digital, even suggested that the digital space can be viewed as a flexible and adaptable tool for peacebuilding work, underscoring the agency of local peacebuilders in shaping the local and the digital.  

In Decolonizing Mediation and Peacebuilding in Post-Electoral Conflicts in Kenya, Dr. Jacinta Maweu questioned the degree of success of the peace mediation of post-2008 electoral violence in Kenya. She observed that the majority of elections since the 2008 peace mediation have been followed by violence. She unpacked the triggers of cyclical post-electoral violence, including weaponized ethnicity, land disputes, and the winner-takes-all electoral system. In conclusion, she argued that cosmetic solutions would continue to serve the narrow interests of the elite and not address the root causes of the post-election conflicts.  

Medina Moosa presented the findings of a chapter of her doctoral dissertation, Visions of Jihad: South African liberation struggles, apartheid counterinsurgency through the movement of the Afghanistan Mujahedeen to Southern Africa in the 1980s. The presentation conceptualized Jihad as a universal emancipatory ideology that was part of a larger tapestry of anti-apartheid struggles in South Africa in the 1980s. She described how locals appropriated diverse international ideas and transformed them locally during the Cold War era. This period produced novel conceptions of Jihad in the South African anti-apartheid struggle, highlighting what is often considered as Muslim politics in the struggle.   

Dr. Abdullahi Hamisu Shehu’s presentation on Trans-national Politics and the Conflict of Ideologies: Exploring the Complexity of Iran’s, Saudi’s and Nigeria’s Influences and Reactions Over the ‘Zaria Massacre’ interrogated the multiple actors influencing and responding to the 2015 Zaria Massacre when hundreds of Shi’a Muslim activists were killed in Northern Nigeria by state security forces. He argued that Saudi Arabian and Iranian ideological imperialism and rivalry had resulted in heightened Shi’a and Sunni tension in the region. The events in Zaria directly responded to political issues and connected to the trends in the Middle East. He concluded that these events are part of a proxy ideological contest of international actors playing out through religious communities locally.  

The panel presentation concluded with discussant Dr. Rosette Sifa Vuninga responding to the perspectives on the new patterns of conflict taking place in Africa. She reviewed the emerging groups and conflict actors, differing political goals, the drivers of conflict trajectories, and war economies influencing the trends, as well as their links to global actors and discourses. She highlighted the international diaspora’s increasing engagement in the politics of their homeland, contributing to the de-localization of conflict. She, however, requested panelists to address the alternatives to the ongoing patterns of global-local relations they critiqued, such as the degree of international actors’ involvement and the extent to which Africans are shaping the local, regional, and global contributions to peacebuilding. 

Below, Dr. Rosette Sifa Vuninga answers the question, “What have you learned by attending the 2024 ASA Annual Meeting?”