Research is a way of examining fact and value of any discipline. It is undertaken within most professions especially in academics. More than a set of skills, it is a way of thinking, examining critically the various aspects of our professional, educational and academic work. It is a habit of questioning what you do, and a systematic examination of the observed information to find answers with a view to instituting appropriate changes for a more effective academic and policy-oriented work.

Research is a structured enquiry that utilizes acceptable scientific methodology to solve problems and create new knowledge that is generally applicable. Research is a process of collecting, analyzing and interpreting information (data) to answer research and policy questions. Research findings heavily contribute for policy formulation in different sectors, including in peace and security issues (focus of the project under implementation).

However, the rich potential of research to advance peace and development, scientific peace research, at most is not on the top of any discussion agenda, although there are glimpse changes taking place. The other challenge is that peace research is conducted in fragmented ways, with many of the interested researchers working in individual isolated contexts.

Knowledge products such as masters and doctoral dissertations in most African universities often lie idle, unused, collecting dust on the shelves of university department libraries, and maybe known only within small circles of academicians. Great effort is required to unplug this huge gap that exists through repackaging and making peace knowledge easily accessible to policy makers and different stakeholders and actors involved in promoting peace.

Opportunities to launch sustainable peace processes for Africa’s developmental agenda have been severely constrained by political instability, leadership and management deficit, civil strife and abject poverty. These negative conditions are preventing Africa from achieving the transformation that is needed to face the challenges of highly competitive and open global environment.

The present state of the African society as characterized by these negative features is bringing into focus issues of sustainable peace, democracy, good governance, rule of law, economic and social development. The complexity of today’s conflicts requires that peace be understood in new ways and that the approach to peace research be reinvented altogether. Peace research now forms an essential component of any strategy for understanding and promoting peace and security. Because the challenges for peace and security continuously change, the knowledge required for comprehension and response to the persistence of violent conflict demands clear-sighted research.

Sustaining Peace and the UN Agenda for Peace and Development

Sustainable peace is conceptualized as both ‘a goal and a process to building a common vision of a society, ensuring that the needs of all segments of the population are taken into account’ in ‘activities aimed at preventing the outbreak, escalation, continuation and recurrence of conflict, addressing root causes, assisting parties to conflict to end hostilities, ensuring national reconciliation, and moving towards recovery, reconstruction and development’.

The concept of sustaining peace calls for better linkages between the UN’s three foundational pillars of peace and security, development, and human rights, in addition to humanitarian action. It replaces what until now has been a sequential approach to conflict that often resulted in silos—notably silos of prevention, humanitarian action, peacekeeping, peacebuilding and development—and calls for better linkages and sharing of instruments across these different sets of responses.

Sustaining positive peace, becomes a transformational imperative for a long-term vision of building a common, inclusive vision of society that considers all points within the conflict cycle—not only in post-conflict reconstruction and reconciliation, but also in early the prevention efforts of addressing the ‘root causes of conflict’ as well as in ‘prevention of the outbreak, escalation, continuation and recurrence of conflict’.

Reinforced by the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which stresses the key role of local ownership in achieving sustainable development, and which aspires to ‘peaceful, just and inclusive societies’, sustaining peace becomes ‘people-centered and inclusive in approach.

Underpinning the concept ‘blockages’ to peace and development is the theory of transformative change which examines and embraces the concept of ‘sustaining peace’, as affirmed in the 2016 UN’s overarching conceptual framework for building peace, through identical resolutions issued by the UN Security Council and the UN General Assembly. Breaking new ground conceptually, the April 2016 UN resolutions focus on sustaining peace “at all stages of conflict and in all its dimensions” and on the imperative to prevent “the outbreak, escalation, continuation and recurrence of conflict”, in response to troubling trends such as the spike in violent conflict worldwide and unparalleled levels of forced displacement.