Towards Durable Peace: A Tribute to Robert O. Matthews

Abstract

It is with great pleasure that I introduce this collection of essays that celebrate the career of Robert O. Matthews. Bob Matthews is well known to long-time readers of the International Journal, having served, alongside Charles Pentland, as its co-editor from the summer 1984 issue to the spring 1992 issue. Bob has continued to make contributions to the IJ in recent years and it is particularly appropriate that this issue be dedicated to his career and research. Bob is also familiar to students and faculty at the University of Toronto. He joined the department of political science in 1969 and served as department chair from 1991 until 1997. Bob formally retired from the department in June 2003 and continues to teach as professor emeritus.Appropriately, then, the papers contained in this special issue of the International Journal were written by students (both contemporary and former) and colleagues of Bob's. They were prepared and presented at a conference hosted in the presence of Bob and Renwick Matthews in the hills of Caledon, Ontario during the autumn of 2004. Contributors were given no specific guidelines for topics except to encourage them to consider some element of Bob's influence in their own research.Not surprisingly, a central theme running through most of the articles is Africa and how its security and developmental challenges can be managed. But the articles also explore a number of questions regarding how Africa's relationship with the west should be defined. What responsibilities does the west have to Africa? Under what conditions should western states intervene in African affairs? What instruments are being developed that can help shift the burden so that African problems are indeed met with African solutions? The papers are distinct and frequently represent remarkably contrasting positions, yet they also tend to overlap in significant areas: human rights, corporate responsibility, conflict resolution, Canadian foreign policy-all themes that have been and continue to be of central importance to the life and work of Bob Matthews.Elisabeth King, for example, examines stalled elements in the effort to reconstruct post-genocide Rwanda. Peacebuilding is not simply a matter of the management of combatants and the achievement of a political solution. Instead, the concept must be broadened to consider more intangible elements often overlooked in discussions of conflict management-such as education. Yet King resists the view that education is necessarily a benign form of conflict resolution and claims instead that education has a perhaps limited but significant role to play that will require further research. The key for King is to better understand what this role is so that countries can move forward in post-conflict reconstruction.Charles Pentland argues that it will likely be Europe, and not the United States or even the UN, that will be best positioned to meet Africa's current and near-term security needs. Beginning in the 19903, two features of European and African security processes became evident. First, as the Maastricht Treaty came into force, the new European Union could offer critical resources. It had few security issues of its own and a collective capacity to produce and export security to other regions. second, Africa developed an increasingly evident security deficit and, more recently, an evolving though still rudimentary capacity to manage these continuing security challenges. Pentland's article examines the attributes of each and then looks at how Europe can attend to Africa's security deficit in the short term and help it to achieve greater self-sufficiency in conflict management over the long term. A security mechanism for Africa that relies on the European Union has a number of advantages, not least of which is that it would be less prone to accusations of neocolonialism than would be national forces.Both the articles by Pentland and by Kristiana Powell and Thomas Tieku are optimistic that the security architecture of the AU differs in significant and positive ways from its predecessor, the OAU. …