Teatime series: Mediation in Africa – prevent and transform conflicts with the power of Mediation!

Gambia – A Success Story of African Peace Mediation?

Thursday, 13. July 2017, 19:00 o’clock
@Café Playing with Eeels (Urbanstraße 32, 10967 Berlin)

The Programme Peace and Security invites you to its first Teatime of the Series Mediation in Africa! Over the course of the next months, we will together with international experts, discuss and analyse challenges and opportunities of (emerging) structures as well as actors on the African continent, that aim at preventing and transforming conflicts with the power of mediation.

Gambia – A Success Story of African Peace Mediation?

After several intensive weeks, long-standing Gambian President Yahya Jammeh stepped down in early 2017 and enabled Adama Barrow, the winner of the parliamentary elections in December 2016, to take office. Preceding this peaceful solution was a strong response by ECOWAS, the Economic Community of West African States, which included a military intervention and fierce mediation efforts by heads of states of the region.

This most recent change of government in the African continent not only gives hope, but also highlights the increasing focus that African institutions and actors are placing on peace mediation as a tool to prevent and solve violent conflicts. Together with you and international mediator Pascal da Rocha we want to look closer at this development: Which actors and institutions are we talking about when we speak of African peace mediation? How important are institutional mediation capacities? How do interventions such as the one by ECOWAS in Gambia go together with the prevailing principle of non-intervention?

Pascal da Rocha is a rostered mediator for the UN and the OSCE, and has worked on or contributed to a variety of mediated processes including the Dayton Agreement, the Darfur Peace Agreement, the Kampala Talks, the Havanna Talks (Colombia) and the Geneva II talks for Syria. Among others, he is currently the lead consultant for the ECOWAS Dialogue and Mediation Curriculum, and a lecturer in Negotiation and Conflict Resolution at Columbia University.

We would be happy if you join the Teatime and contribute to a fruitful discussion!

Please register before the 6th of July!

Peace!