African social actors, moral power and the mobilization for peace

Grant Winners

Dean

Abstract

The proposed scholarly research project is the completion of a book manuscript on examining African social actors’ nonviolent resistance to internal political conflict in the period immediately following the end of the Cold War and the Soviet state (1990s - early 2000s). Scholarship on antiwar and peace movements focuses on experiences in Western Europe, the United States and Canada far more than in Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Latin America. This book presents experiences of peace action from Sub-Saharan Africa. It adds to a small yet growing literature on non-Western European social actors’ nonviolent resistance to war that seeks to redress the imbalance in empirical evidence. More importantly, it relates the African experience of anti-war resistance to the debate on nonviolent resistance under difficult conditions such as conditions of austerity, political oppression and repression and violent political conflict. Cases of African religious leaders and women’s peace actions will be examined with the objective of understanding the gendered and religious dynamic social actors’ nonviolent contentious engagement with the state and opposing armed groups.