Global Peace Initiative for Women Inspires Hope and Courage

Posted on April 2, 2012

By Bahati Jacques, AFJN Policy Analyst

This artlicle was first pulished in AFJN's January-March newsletter

To celebrate its 10th anniversary,  the Global Peace Initiative for Women (GPIW) held an international conference in Kenya on the theme of Healing Communities Through Love and Compassion. Much was said about the existence of deep-seated anger, frustration, and suffering in our communities.  Some of these proceed from political lies, social and economic grievances, ethnic tensions, scramble for resources, terrorism, environmental degradation, religious intolerance, and the legacy of colonialism and neocolonialism.   I was invited to attend and speak at the conference in Nairobi.

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Liberian Women Lay Foundation for Strength and Progress

Posted July 1, 2010

By: Josh Perry

For women in the United States, the rights of today were achieved by courageous women with a cause and a drive to see change. These women came, and continue to come, in all shapes and colors. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony were among the first to begin the United States women’s movement; Rosa Parks was an essential part to the Montgomery bus boycott during the civil rights movement; Sandra Day O’Connor was the first woman nominated and confirmed to the U.S. Supreme Court; Hillary Clinton was a strong candidate for the Democratic Party nomination for President in 2008 and is now Secretary of State under the Obama administration; and lastly, Sonia Sotomayor is the first Hispanic man or woman to be confirmed as a U.S. Supreme Court justice. These women know what passion is and how to achieve equality. African women, arguably, have the same drive and determination for change; however, in an overly patriarchal culture, outspoken women fear reprisal, degradation, or worse. The Liberian case study is worth all attention. Women who were directly affected by the civil war related injustices used the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) as their platform to demand, among other things, quality, justice, and freedom of speech.

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You Cannot Compare Apples to Oranges: Ubushingantahe vs. Criminal Justice

Posted June 18, 2010

By: Josh Perry

The solidified rules of law present in the United States have been ironed out over the course of centuries; now, when students learn about the American legal system they learn codified rules, regulations, punishments, and resolutions. These overall norms work well for the United States, but can this work for other countries, for example Burundi? Burundi, a country located in sub-Saharan Africa whose history has been ravaged by ethnic conflict, should not have to conform to Westernized legal systems. Traditionally, Burundi has used a council of wise men, the Bashingantahe, to settle legal disputes.

Conflict resolution in Burundi was halted for decades due to the ongoing ethnic strife between the Hutus and the Tutsis. As the Burundian civil war continued, a British based organization named ActionAid helped to rebuild customary institutions that were destroyed by the conflict, and the Bashingantahe council, known also as Ubushingantahe, was one.  However, in 2000, the passage of the Arusha Accord settled the civil war, brought about peace negotiations, and formally recognized the Ubushingantahe as a conciliatory judicial mechanism. The members of the council (Abashingantahe or singularly Umushungantage) are not just chosen at random; instead, there are multiple qualities one has to have to become a council member. The qualities include, but are not limited to: experience and wisdom, holds love and truth in high regard, has a sense of honor and dignity, a developed sense of justice and fairness, understand the common good, and must balance action and speech.  The selection of these members is from a pool of the wisest men, and possibly women, in a village to settle disputes impartially.

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Justice, Reconciliation and Peacebuilding Seen Through Africa Eyes

By Rev.  Clement Aapenguo

Posted on April 13, 2010

Download the full PDF document here or watch part of his presentation here

Between 1980 and 2003, the three northern regions of Ghana experienced 26 violent conflicts. The worst was in 1994. That conflict is not very well known because it was in the wake of the Rwandan genocide. In 2000 the Catholic Diocese of Damongo in collaboration with the Catholic Relief Services started a peace project to build local capacity for justice-building, reconciliation and peace-building.

In the course of my work I had to deal with the issue of the relevance of a Western style peace-building in African conflicts. Why not use the African traditional systems of conflict resolution?  Implicit in these statements is the assumption that the Western style is foreign and in effective. African traditional systems work better in an African setting. African conflicts, African solutions. At the international level, indigenous and traditional practices of peace-building are regarded as unaccountable, opague and contradictory to the “enlightened” intentions of Western form of peace-building (liberal Peace) and internationally sponsored post war reconstruction efforts.