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AbstractThis article is about the role of civil society after violent conflict. It argues that the transformations that civil society organisations (CSOs) make are more ambiguous than supporting donors and NGOs presume. The article analyses how, ten years after the 1996 peace agreements, Guatemalan CSOs deal with agrarian conflict. It discusses in detail the case of a church-related organisation assisting peasants with agrarian conflicts and the challenges it faced in defining its strategies. The article argues that supporting donors and NGOs should stop seeing the difficulties of organisational change in post-conflict situations exclusively in terms of the internal incapacities of civil society. Instead, they should re-politicise their analyses and focus on the importance of broader social and political processes in post-conflict settings for the strategic options open to CSOs.

ABSTRACTThe idea has gained ground in recent years that, as conflicts in the countries of the Great Lakes Region are strongly interlinked, regional approaches are necessary to resolve them. This interest in regional dimensions of conflict and peacebuilding also gains currency in other parts of the world. Attention to regional approaches is reflected in the efforts of international organisations and donors to promote civil society peacebuilding. They assume that regional cooperation and exchange between civil society organisations contribute to peace, and provide an alternative to single-country interventions or regional diplomatic initiatives. This paper explores how such assumptions work out in practice. Experiences in the Great Lakes Region show that local and international organisations have difficulty in analysing the regional character of conflict and arriving at collaborative regional strategies. Moreover, local civil society organisations are deeply embedded in the politics of regional conflict. Consequently, the shift to regional peacebuilding approaches remains more theoretical than practical. This paper suggests that international supporting organisations need to adjust their ambitions in regional peacebuilding, but nonetheless have roles in fostering regional identification among civil society organisations.

Despite earlier, negative experiences in East Africa, in early 1997 the government of Rwanda embarked on an ambitious programme for villagisation and resettlement. While the Rwanda authorities present the programme as entirely different from its predecessors, a review of those and of the implementation of villagisation and resettlement in Rwanda shows that this statement cannot hold. Nevertheless, the programme gets considerable support from international agencies. This article investigates how international agencies have accepted and upheld the 'narrative of difference' of the Rwandan authorities. It argues that, notwithstanding the claims of the government, lessons from the experiences with villagisation in Mozambique, Ethiopia and Tanzania are relevant for the Rwanda case and should be taken into account.

Strengthening or even 'building' civil society has become a preoccupation of international development actors working in post-conflict settings. However, how to do so effectively remains a difficult and theoretically underexplored question. This article identifies two core challenges. The first is how to overcome the discrepancy between what international development actors aim to achieve in building civil society – namely the strengthening of the social contract between a state and its citizens – and strategies to achieve it that focus narrowly on local NGOs and on their roles in apolitical service delivery, leaving out the state. The second is how to take better account of the complexities of the local institutions and processes concerned, and the alternative forms of social contract that might come about. This article explores these challenges and recommends how debate and research might proceed.

Since the early 1990s, building peace during and after conflict has been moving away from the conference tables of diplomats to informal settings created by local NGOs. The vast majority, if not all, of the peacebuilding policy and literature argues for strengthening local organisations as vehicles for peace. This paper starts from the observation that there is a dire lack of organisational perspective to the processes set into motion. Current local peacebuilding policy, we argue, is based on analyses that are far removed from the everyday practices of the actors engaged in peacebuilding. The paper offers instead a qualitative approach that gives central attention to the dynamics of peace organisations and the way conflict is experienced in the everyday life of local people. It analyses the case of one local women's peace organisation: the 'Sudanese Women's Voice for Peace'. Peacebuilding is done by people, and the dynamics of their organisation are crucial for its success. The paper argues that a process approach to peace organisations will enhance agencies' efforts for local peacebuilding. Such an approach focuses on the question how actors in and around organisations give meaning to an organisation. The paper outlines this approach, presents five central properties of local peace organisations, and discusses what lessons can be learnt from this perspective for the practice of peacebuilding.

To accommodate the needs of hundreds of thousands of returnees after war & genocide in 1994, the new Rwandan Government launched a settlement program, Imidugudu. Since early 1997, this program has targeted the entire rural population: all scattered households in the country had to be regrouped in villages. What started as a response to an emergency turned into an ambitious but controversial development program. The program has been implemented with support from international organizations, including UNHCR & numerous NGOs. This paper shows that an emergency discourse was central in their considerations to give their support. Secondly, it considers local processes of implementation. Two case studies make clear that as of now, little has been achieved of the envisaged integrated approach to settlement, land use, & livelihoods. Moreover, the authoritative & top-down implementation raises concerns about the political implications of the program. It raises some pertinent questions about the possibilities & constraints for integrating development into relief. 27 References. Adapted from the source document.