Conflict Assessment and Peacebuilding Planning: Toward a Participatory Approach to Human Security
Achieving human security requires strategic peacebuilding; and too often, critical steps in this sequence are missing, or conducted by different groups of people without coordination. The Conflict Assessment and Peacebuilding Handbook aims to improve the effectiveness of peacebuilding by better linking practical conflict assessment exercises to self-assessment, theories of change, designing and planning, and monitoring and evaluation of peacebuilding efforts. Recognizing that many groups skimp on assessment fearing an analysis paralysis, or design programs based on untested assumptions, this approach provides basic as well as advanced tools to improve peacebuilding practice. This concise and lucid handbook tackles the problem of too much data by suggesting ways to sort, categorize and prioritize data to make it useful. Through its synthesis of a wide range of conceptual frameworks into a convenient and logical framework useful for practitioners such as NGOs developing projects, journalists wanting to write conflict-sensitive stories, or government/military agencies designing large scale efforts, the Conflict Assessment and Peacebuilding Handbook is an essential scholarly and practical tool for the study and implementation of peacebuilding efforts.
The legacy of the white highlands: Land rights, ethnicity and the post-2007 election violence in Kenya
Abstract A violent conflict engulfed Kenya after a flawed and disputed presidential election result in December 2007. Before then, Kenya was considered an icon, a bastion of political stability and economic prosperity in Africa. It surprised many that this icon would go up in flames so fast. Analyses of what went wrong with Kenya tend to gloss over the land question and ethnicity as factors behind the violence. Yet ethnicity and the manner in which the land question in the former white highlands and especially in the Rift Valley region has been addressed throughout the post-colonial period played an important role in the post-2007 election violence. This contribution argues that the reforms pursued through the settlement schemes and the land purchase programme by successive governments ethnicised the land question and established a ground for political conflict. It also shows that by looking at Kenya's politics of access to the former white highlands this violence becomes predictable. The discussion concludes that political leaders have not been keen to address the land question and it therefore remains a hot spot that, unless addressed in a democratic manner, may well ignite recurrence of violence.
Control and Crisis in Colonial Kenya: The Dialectic of Domination
Professor Berman argues that the colonial state was shaped by the contradictions between maintaining effective political control with limited coercive force and ensuring the profitable articulation of metropolitan and settler capitalism with African societies. North America: Ohio U Press; Kenya: EAEP