Since the end of the Cold War, there has been an upsurge of conflicts throughout Africa, especially in the 1990s. They rarely ended with the clear victory of one party over the other, but rather through negotiated peace settlements. Most of these conflicts were not interstate but inner-state conflicts and their causes were deeply rooted in the respective societies. With the UN Agenda for Peace (1992) post-conflict reconstruction has become a major element of national and international policies on the continent. One of the problems is that much of this reconstruction process rests on the false assumption that that developing countries which emerge from war are like a “blank slate” (Christopher Cramer) upon which a neo-liberal vision of the State can be built.

Against this “blank slate” vision, which is often linked with a very ‘technicist’ approach to peace making and peace-building, this module argues that peace is not just the end of a ‘moment’ in a country’s history (war, or violent conflict) and the beginning of a new era of ‘post-conflict’ which would mark a clear rupture with the past. On the contrary, it builds on the assumption and will show that the achievement of peace is but a step in a long historical and political process, and that conflict, war and peace are all part of the historical dynamics of state construction and formation – in Africa and elsewhere.

For this, the module looks at two crucial elements of peace process and peace agreements, whose implications on state-building in post-conflict-phases is largely under-researched: Firstly, it considers the way in which past memories of (social, political, cultural, ethnic) divisions that were at the origins of violent conflict have been – or not been – integrated into the peace process. In other words, this first part of the module looks at how the issue of dealing wit the past was treated in the peace agreements, with examples drawn from Burundi and Sierra Leone. processes in the two countries.

Secondly, it deals with various forms of mediation in peace processes and their consequences on following power-sharing agreements and the functioning of society. By examining the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion that prevail in peace processes, the module will shed new light on the links between the actual peace negotiations and the dynamics of power sharing as well as the institutionalisation of power relations in a post-conflict setting. Thereby it builds on the assumption that efficiency in mediation does not necessarily correlate with sustainable ways of structuring a “post-conflict society”.