Overcoming Barriers to Peace: Mediating Violent, Ethnic, Intra-State Crises in Africa

Abstract

Ethnic violence across many regions of Africa presents the international community with wrenching dilemmas and difficult decisions. While the images coming out of the Darfur region of Sudan are perhaps freshest in our minds, many other African countries have experienced outbreaks in the recent past – Kenya, Ethiopia, Somalia, the DRC, Rwanda, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Burundi to name just a few. What is the responsibility of the international and regional communities in the face of such conflict? What are the best means for translating concern into action? This study grapples with these issues, by focusing in on one particularly difficult set of conflicts – ethnicity-related violent crises in Africa during the post-Cold War era - and one approach to crisis management – mediation.