CALL FOR PAPERS/PAPER PROPOSALS
MANAGING HERDERS AND FARMERS CONFLICTS IN AFRICA: POLICIES LEGISLATIONS, CONVENTIONS AND PROTOCOLS
Several African states have experienced a resurgence or intensification of herders and farmers conflicts in the last two to three decades. From the Sahel to the West and Horn stretching to Eastern and Southern Africa, transhumant pastoralists and sedentary farmers burn, loot, and kill for land, water, cow, or crop. These conflagrations articulate pre-existing ethnic and political conflicts, growing terrorist insurgencies, organized crimes and violence in ways that confound the task of managing the conflicts.
Whereas extant studies of the conflicts appear fixated on establishing causalities, scholarly engagement with policies, legislations, conventions and protocols enacted and deployed by states and regional organizations, such as the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and similar organizations, to tackle the conflicts and build peace among the belligerent parties grow thinner. Even though existing discussions hint at instruments adopted by state and non-state actors to address the conflicts, scholarly investigation of the core conflict management policies, concrete conflict resolution legislations and specific protocols and conventions that promote peacebuilding initiatives remain relatively scarce. While not depreciating the importance of unmasking causalities, a robust intellectual engagement with the laws, policies, protocols, and conventions is, after all, not out of place.
What are these policies, legislations, conventions, and protocols? To what extent have they been successful or unsuccessful in achieving the desired results? How do we account for the successes or failures? This special issue seeks to identify policies and legislations deployed to mitigate herders’ and farmers’ conflicts in Africa and the extent to which they have failed or succeeded in achieving the desired goal.
We invite scholars and researchers working on this theme to submit paper proposals or completed papers for review and possible publication in African Conflicts and Peacebuilding Review (ACPR) Volume 13, Number 2 (2023). Interested authors should submit abstracts (maximum 300 words) to the following email address: specialpapers23@gmail.com on or before 31 October 2022.
After the deadline, submitted abstracts will be reviewed and decisions communicated to the authors. Thereafter authors of selected abstracts will be requested to develop the abstracts into papers and submit them for review.
Future Africa (University of Pretoria)
