Evaluating Third-Party Involvement in The Central African Republic
Is third-party involvement actually effective in resolving a decade-long conflict?
The Central African Republic has been in a Civil War ever since 2012. The causes of conflict can be attributed to a few factors: Persistent poor governance and its consequences, Weak and centralized public services unable to function, A security sector weakened from within, The rise of entrepreneurs of violence, etc. The lack of development plays a huge role in this conflict as a lack of development means the government is unable to have a foundation upon which effective governance can be built, and this provided the ability for conflict to arise. The failure of highly centralized and self-interested governments over decades to provide security and basic services to the people has lost the whole political class its legitimacy within the Central African society. In this article, I will examine the extent to which third-party involvement is actually effective in the Central African Republic.
Third-party involvement in the case of the Central African Republic had been crucial in transforming the conflict away from violence and gradually building peace. However, its success remains in question as the foundational problems within the country have not been addressed. When evaluating today’s question, let’s understand Positive Peace first, which is defined as sustainability and peace being achieved in a society, and clearly, that is nowhere close to the status quo of the Central African Republic, thus a third party involvement in achieving this had failed; However, this is not to say it is not effective: The extent of which it transformed this intr-state conflict away of violence had ben effective to a small extent.
We can use Galtung’s Conflict Triangle to first establish the conflicted reasoning in the Central African Republic, consisting of Attitudes, Behaviour, and Contradictions. The attitude of the conflict could be observed from The Seleka, a coalition of rebel groups, which accused the government of failing to abide by peace agreements. The attitude on both sides had remained extremely polarized on both ends where compromises can’t be considered as a way to mediate conflict. With regards to Behavior, we see them initiating armed attacks on the government along with 14 other military factions and hundred of groups being divided up as groups. This had led to the contradiction that stemmed from this would be the continuous armed conflict occurring between the CAR & armed rebel groups. Therefore, with Galtung’s Conflict Triangle, we can effectively conclude third-party involvement to understand that it wouldn’t work out effectively if the roots of the conflicts are not solved.
One third-party involvement would be The United States with the United Nation’s effort to launch MINUSCA by providing $281M towards the program with most of it being allocated towards humanitarian aid to the civilians. It took on further actions to impose targeted sanctions on individuals and entities contributing to the violence. MINUSCA also placed UN peacekeeping troops within the country but its intention remained to not engage in direct conflict with the parties involved. Other International NGOs like the World Food Programs provided food and nutrition assistance to around 800,000 people in CAR, while UNHCR continued to provide life-saving protection and assistance along with Red Cross in the country. These third-party involvements save lives and ease the consequences of the intra-state conflict, but they did not target the central problem of the “attitude” part of the conflict, and so the conflict continues with more people being killed.
On the other hand, the more effective third-party involvement within this conflict would be the Bangui Forum, which reached a new disarmament agreement between the Seleka and Anti-balaka while setting a timeline for election and extension of the current government’s mandate. They made a tremendous effort to target the structural problem that drives all the conflicts and proposed possible solutions for it. Although their efforts failed as conflict arises even after their initiatives, later on, they are on the right track to driving society away from conflict and developing national and local mechanisms for justice and reconciliation. Thus this serves as evidence for third-party involvement being impactful to a small extent within CAR’s intra-state conflict.
When observing the Central African Republic’s conflict, I used the liberalist and realist approaches to analyze this issue and found it interesting that I ended up with the same result: A realist approach to this conflict would perceive this conflict as impossible to be solved at least in the short term, not even mentioning building lasting peace within the region. This is since there is a lack of interest for powerful countries in taking further actions like deploying troops within the region to fight the Seleka group, and the corrupted CAR government will not be able to win this war alone. The fact remains the Central African Republic remains in a position where it can’t provide economic or strategic interest to other countries to be able to change the status quo; From a liberalist perspective, building peace is possible, but that requires peacekeeping powers from third parties to get involved to peacekeeping so that the ground for peacebuilding could be built. We’ve seen the Bangui Forum’s attempt for peacekeeping fail, and no other states attempting to provide assistance to further peacekeeping within the region, thus even in a Liberalist’s case, the situation in the Central African Republic remains stagnated in the early stage of driving away from conflict. Therefore, it could be said that from both perspectives, a third-party involvement within CAR had proven to be little to no effect to drive the country away from violence.
We can also analyze this conflict using the Greed vs Grevience model: Greed is actions that are being performed after a cost-benefit analysis to benefit a group, mostly because of economic reasons while Grievances stand for the concept that people rebel over issues of identity. This is relevant to C.A.R since, for greed, they rebel due to economic reasons: 75% of the country lives in poverty, this is worsened by the fact that the government doesn’t have an effective economic policy to address the crisis where they just gave 50,000–100,000 Central African francs (CFA) to people to return to their houses; On the other hand, we see that the fourteen main armed factions negotiation with the CAR government was ineffective since they believe that their problems are not addressed by the government, and this is why Seleka and Anti-balaka militias along with hundreds of other localized groups operate more and more openly, increasing their influence to control over ⅔ of the country’s territories. Why is this important to today’s question? Neither the United Nations nor other IGOs effectively address both greed and grievance within the country, and these two factors have been proven to be the driving factor of the violence within the country. Current IGOs are placing attention on the recent manifestation of violence between communities, without allowing communities to examine the true deep causes of the conflict. This model allows us to identify the issue that is important within the country and examine how third parties deal with these factors.
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