This conference is the fifth in an annual Wilton Park series on peacebuilding in Africa that started in 2015 held in partnership with the African Peacebuilding Network of the Social Science Research Council, New York and the African Leadership Centre, Nairobi, and supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Previous events assessed the changing dynamics of conflict and other evolving challenges, the ways in which African peacebuilding actors have been responding to these challenges, how to sustain civil society engagement in peacebuilding and how to build more effective interaction between African and global peacebuilding.
Across the previous conferences, a number of key conclusions arose, including recommendation that new models were needed for addressing the social contract between state and citizen, that building more inclusive societies is critically important for peacebuilding, and that peacebuilding must move beyond state and elite-centred approaches to encompass the wider communities involved in conflict. This meeting is designed to follow up on these analyses and conclusions from the previous conferences by focusing above all on how peacebuilding actors and leaders can take action to put these into practice.
The overarching objective for the conference is to produce ideas for initiatives in the following three areas: how to bring new voices into peacebuilding; whether and how networks could usefully be created between traditional peacebuilding actors and organisations and how to bring these new voices into both existing and new networks; and how to use the leverage derived from new voices and networks to help enable the implementation of new strategies.
