ملخص الفعالية: إعادة التفكير في بناء السلام في أفريقيا من خلال العمل الذي تقوده المجتمعات المحلية
The standard playbook goes: crisis, humanitarian intervention, mediation, peacekeeping, and peacebuilding last. But communities living through conflict don't experience it that way.
Protection, trust-building, and social repair are already happening in the middle of insecurity - often led by women, youth, and local networks. If Africa is to take greater ownership of its peace and security future, it must also rethink the tools it relies on. Particularly the long-standing separation between emergency response, peacekeeping and peacebuilding.
It was against that backdrop that Nonviolent Peaceforce and the UNDP Regional Service Centre for Africa convened over 140 practitioners, policymakers, and peacebuilding actors in Addis Ababa for a policy dialogue in April 2026. Participants focused on a key question: what it would take to stop treating conflict prevention as an afterthought?
Peacebuilding doesn't wait
NP’s Lesley Connolly introduced Unarmed Civilian Protection (UCP) as a practical example of what it looks like to build peace in the middle of an emergency rather than after it. UCP works through relationship-building, protective presence, local mediation, and trauma-responsive engagement - tools that are effective precisely because they are rooted in community trust.
"Conflict prevention and peacebuilding do not have to wait. It must begin on day one of a crisis, grounded in relationships and led by communities."
Communities in conflict are already doing all of this at once. The question is whether the international system is willing to recognize, and fund, that reality.
Left: Dr. Matthias Naab, Director, UNDP Regional Service Centre for Africa. Right: Lesley Connolly, NP Regional Policy and Advocacy Manager for the African Union
Insights from Sudan and DRC
NP’s Chris Ogbonna described what community-led protection looks like when it's tested under pressure. When El Fasher fell, civilians trained by NP in Early Warning and Early Response organized mass relocations to safer areas like Tawila. Moving in groups, they used protective accompaniment to deter the harassment, extortion, and kidnapping that typically plague transit corridors.
"Our job at NP is not to lead these people – our job is to follow them, resource them, and ensure their courage is never again met with international silence."
NP’s Anselme Muzalia Wimye brought two decades of peacebuilding experience to the conversation. His message echoed what colleagues from across the continent were saying: that formal peace processes consistently miss something:
"In various peace processes, one of the missing pieces remains the involvement of affected local communities."
Left: Chris Ogbonna, NP Head of Programme in Sudan. Right: NP Anselme Muzalia Wimye, Area Project Coordinator in the DRC.
A wider conversation
The panel also included Christian Acheleke of Local Youth Corner Cameroon - five-time listed among Africa's most influential young people - who spoke to youth exclusion as a persistent driver of instability. Jesutimilehin O. Akamo of the Institute for Peace and Security Studies brought a research lens to the gap between Africa's strong normative frameworks for prevention and what actually gets funded.
From UNDP Sudan, Deputy Resident Representative Surayo Buzurukova joined online to speak to why humanitarian response, development, and peacebuilding need to work together rather than in isolation.
The audience - diplomats, civil society actors, AU and UN representatives, and academics, all mostly from African countries - pushed the conversation further, raising questions about donor priorities, flexible financing, and how to better show what prevention actually achieves.
What emerged
Violent conflict is rooted in governance failures, exclusion, and inequality - and preventing it costs far less than responding to it, even if current funding levels don't reflect that. Communities, especially women, youth, religious leaders, and civil society organizations, are not passive recipients of protection. They are already reducing violence, mediating disputes, and holding things together during active conflict. The role of outside actors is to support that, not replace it. Peacebuilding cannot wait for formal settlements - it has to happen alongside the emergency, not after it.
Unarmed Civilian Protection is one such approach: scalable, nonviolent, and grounded in community trust.
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The dialogue concluded with a shared call for political commitment and sustained partnerships capable of moving prevention from rhetoric to action, and placing communities at the centre of Africa’s peace and security future.