Human Security and Sierra Leone's Post-Conflict Development. Este artículo no está disponible.Human Security and Sierra Leone's Post-Conflict Development

Achieving security and development in the post-conflict era is a challenge with which stakeholders have to grapple. While stakeholders are quick to claim success when physical hostilities cease between the belligerents, ensuring sustainable peace has been a daunting task. In some countries in Africa, the post-conflict era is characterized by organizing elections to ensure greater political participation. It is believed that elections will begin a process of openness and trust in the governing system. A supplement to electoral democracy has been power sharing arrangements used to resolve post-election violence, and ensure stability within the state. However, what underlie most conflicts in Africa is the marginalization and lack of an enabling environment to achieve individual life objectives. Policies and strategies to achieve security and enhance development post conflict have, at best, been an extremely slow process and sometimes elusive. In Sierra Leone, for instance, though the official declaration of the end of war and the successful general elections held in 2002, 2007, and 2012 have led to some domestic stability, developmental targets in the post-conflict era have proceeded at a snail’s pace. The country continues to rank at the bottom of most UNDP human development indicators since 2002. Human Security and Sierra Leone’s Post-Conflict Development analyzes the extent to which human security issues have been addressed and subsequently implemented in the post-conflict reconstruction process. While Sierra Leone has made tremendous efforts at implementing reforms in the areas of political sensitization, promotion of civil rights and civil liberties, as well as personal security, the lack on the part of the government to effectively address the unemployment problem has negatively affected security and developmental targets. Thus, the post-conflict management strategies in Sierra Leone fail to secure and promote some aspects of human security, leading to fragile peace and slow progress in achieving sustainable security and development. Human security is an all-encompassing phenomenon and must be addressed to achieve overall wellbeing of the people, especially in post-conflict environments.

Francis Wiafe-Amoako is an instructor in International relations and security, international development, comparative politics and African politics at the University of Toronto and Ryerson University in Canada. His research focuses on migration and security issues, conflict management and post-conflict stability, institutional design, and the democratization process in Africa. He is also the Director of The Center for Sustained Domestic Security and Development (CESDOSED). The Center's main goal is the development of unique and viable institutions for stability and development in Africa.

Ali A. Mazrui is a distinguished political scientist, a leading historian, and a multimedia public intellectual. He has written dozens of books, and narrated documentaries on British and American television. In Eastern Africa he grew up among Arabs, and in England and the United States he was partly educated by Jews. Foreign Policy magazine has described Mazrui as one of the top 100 public intellectuals alive in the world today. Ali Mazrui is currently Director of the Institute of Global Cultural Studies at Binghamton University, New York; Senior Scholar in Africana Studies at Cornell University, New York; and Chancellor of Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology, Nairobi, Kenya.