Peace and Power Sharing in Africa: A Not So Obvious Relationship

Abstract

Peace accords usually involve top politicians and military leaders, who negotiate, sign, and/or benefit from an agreement. What is conspicuously absent from such negotiations is broad-based participation by those who should benefit in the first place: citizens. More specifically, the local level of security provision and insecurity production is rarely taken into account. The analysis of recent African peace agreements shows important variations in power-sharing devices and why it is important to ask who is sharing power with whom. Experiences with power sharing are mixed and far less positive than assumed by outside negotiators. POWER SHARING LOOKS LIKE A LOGICAL APPROACH to sustainable conflict management in multi-ethnic societies. In fact, it has been proposed time and again and often inscribed in peace agreements. As Jarstad notes, ‘power sharing is attractive to peace negotiators’.1 It might be less so for (all) warring parties and the general population. Negotiators and signatories may ignore and sideline security concerns of ordinary citizens, doing little to address the underlying causes of conflict, and thus reducing the usefulness of power sharing. It is also doubtful whether the power-sharing ingredients of peace agreements are conducive to peace. One problem of the current tendency to establish hasty power-sharing solutions from the outside is the widespread popular perception that democracy is thereby sacrificed in the name of peace. This problem is frequently overlooked in specialized academic debates. In this contribution I first summarize some relevant arguments in the academic debate on power sharing and war termination. In a second step, I screen all recent major African peace agreements (1999–2007) for their power-sharing content. Finally, I analyse two country cases of peace agreements (Liberia and Cote d’Ivoire) and one post-election crisis settlement (Kenya), all of which relied on powersharing ingredients. It will become obvious that power-sharing agreements Andreas Mehler (mehler@giga-hamburg.de) is Director of the Institute of African Affairs at the German Institute of Global and Area Studies, Hamburg. 1. Anna Jarstad, ‘Power sharing for peace and democracy?’ (Paper presented at the 47th annual meeting of the International Studies Association, San Diego, 22–25 March 2006), p. 9. 453 2010 at G IG A G rm an Intitute of G lobal nd A ea S tuies. Libniz Intitut fer G lo on S etem er 9, afraf.oxjournals.org D ow nladed fom