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This section is the text of an address delivered by Nelson Mandela to the Kosovo Commission's final seminar. It focuses on Africa's need for international attention and assistance to fight gross violations of human rights and promote economic development in places of former and on‐going conflict such as Burundi.

This chapter on elections and electoral systems in Burundi follows the same format as all the other country chapters in the book. The first section is introductory and contains a historical overview, discussion of the evolution of electoral provisions, an account of the current electoral provisions (not in force since the coup d’état of 1996), and a comment on the electoral statistics (no official data are available). The second section consists of ten tables. These are: 2.1 Dates of National Elections, Referendums, and Coups d’Etat; 2.2 Electoral Body 1961–1993 (data on population size, registered voters, and votes cast); 2.3 Abbreviations (abbreviations and full names of political parties and alliances used in tables 2.6, 2.7, and 2.9); 2.4 Electoral Participation of Parties and Alliances 1961–1993 (participation of political parties and alliances in chronological order and including the years and number of contested elections); 2.5 Referendums 1981–1992 (details of registered voters and votes cast); 2.6 Elections for Constitutional Assembly (not held); 2.7 Parliamentary Elections 1961–1993 (details of registered voters and votes cast); 2.8 Composition of Parliament 1961–1993; 2.9 Presidential Elections 1984 and 1993 (details of registered voters and votes cast nationally and regionally); and 2.10 List of Power Holders 1961–1998.

The collection of census data on the ethnic origin of the population poses political problems for many black African states. The discrimination that led towards genocide in Rwanda and Burundi was of particular concern from 1989. South Africa had not ratified the ICERD at the time of writing.

The kingdoms of East-Central Africa provide examples of patrimonial states utilized for the purposes of European over-rule. In societies where political clientage was ubiquitous, the Kingdom of Buganda became the archetype for a chiefly oligarchy with guaranteed status and lands, as well as a surrogate agency for administering segmentary clans in the region. It became difficult later to preserve this legacy of British administration within a unitary state, as Uganda moved towards an elected government in the 1950s. But the Kabaka of Buganda reinforced the patrimonial system of allocating offices and resources; and he became Chief of State, until his kingdom was dismantled by President Obote in 1966. Similar policies of using royal lineages to administer a subordinate peasantry were applied by German and Belgian officials in Rwanda and Burundi. The exacerbation of traditional patron client divisions by administrative patronage had disastrous consequences for relations between Tutsi and Hutu at decolonization in 1962.

Iraq and Afghanistan are hardly alone in having to face failure in their transition to peace. Since the end of the Cold War, countries at low levels of development — ranging from Haiti to Timor-Leste, to Liberia, Sierra Leone, Burundi, and others in Africa, and several in the Balkans — have emerged from civil conflict to establish a fragile peace. Others, such as Colombia, the Palestinian territories, and Sudan, it is hoped, will begin such a transition soon. The purpose of the book is to integrate theoretical and practical issues related to post-conflict economic reconstruction in a methodical, comprehensive, consistent, and rigorous way to facilitate effective reconstruction and national reconciliation and to ensure that conflict will not recur. The book is based on personal experience but in addition provides a comprehensive review of the literature.

Burundi's crisis started back on October 21, 1993, by reason of a failed coup d'etat – an attack made by the military officers on the newly elected officials of the government. Due to this violence in the capital, news regarding the coup reached the different parts of the country, which resulted in nation-wide interethnic killing. Since then, Burundi has been held in a unceasing humanitarian emergency that made the small nation an armed camp; however, a divided, internationally devastated and an ungovernable one. The military leadership caused institutionalized bias, together with ethnic and regional lines, and later on developing widespread discrimination selective development, as well as genocidal slaughter both on local and national levels. While different agencies have offered assistance to resolve the conflict over the past years, they have failed due to the labels of Tutsi and Hutu: ethnic groups behind the hostility.

This chapter sets out a common substance to contemporary framework peace agreements. The centre-piece of peace agreements is the provision they make for the holding and exercising of political power. Peace agreements across conflicts evidence strikingly similar arrangements and devices for accommodating the competing demands of the conflict's protagonists. An analytical conceptualization of the common peace agreement framework with respect to how power is to be held and exercised, is provided. In general terms, peace agreements attempt conflict resolution by (i) redefining the state; (ii) disaggregating power; and (iii) dislocating power. The chapter illustrates the analytical framework with reference to a varied range of conflict types rather boldly suggesting that virtually all peace agreements reaching the framework stage — and many more proposals for resolution — exhibit this common framework, completely or in substantial part.

The ‘rebuilding’ of a society in the aftermath of conflict or mass violence often subsumes the dynamic requirements of human security into a technical task that belies or fails to fully comprehend the needs of the community being ‘built’. Indeed, as Trudy Fraser in Chapter Ten explains, critics have suggested that ‘building’ in the aftermath of conflict merely serves to impose externally configured normative benchmarks as a panacea for peace, privileging the goals of international actors at the expense of local actors. One of the main problems is that externally configured normative benchmarks do not necessarily conform to local models of peace and security. In order for the ‘building’ to be reflective of the dynamic requirements of human security, this chapter asserts that it must be responsive to the following questions: (1) who is doing the building?; (2) what is being built?; and (3) for whom is it being built? These three questions speak to separate but interrelated issues in the context of modern state-, peace- and nation-building, and highlights the ambiguity that currently exists between the initial (state-security-centric) and subsequent (human-security-centric) phases of intervention and ‘(re-)building’.

This chapter examines the new UN peacebuilding architecture—the Peacebuilding Commission, Peacebuilding Fund, and Peacebuilding Support Office—in relation to the challenges faced by the termination of UN peacekeeping operations and the requirements for the maintenance of peace in the period following exit. The PBC was established to facilitate the exit of costly peacekeepers while supporting the transition and reconfiguration of assistance by other parts of the UN and international system that remain involved in postconflict states. This chapter considers how the UN Security Council has used the Peacebuilding Commission, from its outset, to help sustain international attention in postconflict Burundi and Sierra Leone following the drawdown and withdrawal of UN peacekeepers from these two countries. Given the Commission’s infant status, it remains to be seen what its own exit strategy will be for the countries on its agenda.

In this chapter, we are mainly interested in ways that use of the Internet can promote helpful, legitimate, and practical support to teachers, students, and others interested in education for peace, conflict resolution, and violence prevention. The World Wide Web, a powerful global network, has immense capacity to influence people (especially children) that can be compared to the influence of television. Research that has been done on television viewing shows that it can have positive and negative effects on behavior beginning in early childhood. It does not affect everyone in the same way—variables such as age, socioeconomic status, and identification with television characters all play significant roles in how content affects a child. The Internet and other interactive media are similar to television by way of underlying factors (such as observational learning, attitudes, and arousal) that influence behavior. Over the past several decades, some of the most profound changes in the way we live have come from the revolution in information technology (IT). A wide range of technologies has not only made it easier to communicate but also to send and utilize information. These devices have not stayed in the province of institutions or specialists but have found their way into common use. From cell phones and personal digital assistants to computers (just to touch on some of the most common of these technologies), they have changed the way ordinary people interact and behave. Their effects have been profound, as reflected in the speed with which these technologies have evolved and insinuated themselves into everyday life. Perhaps the most important of these technologies is the personal computer (PC). In itself, the rise of the PC was a dramatic event, allowing more people to apply the capabilities of the computer to small business, personal activity, and schoolwork. But in the past decade, other information technologies that utilize the PC, the most important of which are the World Wide Web and electronic mail (e-mail), have appeared and promise further large-scale uses.

Contemporary education must try hard to understand where we as a species came from and how our ancient heritage and recent historical transformation contribute to our current tendencies toward hatred and violence. If we are to overcome or control these destructive tendencies, we must grasp the powerful currents that make the task at once difficult and essential. Development of our ancestors took place in the context of small, face-to-face groups that provided the security of familiarity, support in times of stress, shared coping strategies, and enduring attachments that sustained hope and adaptation for a lifetime. Reciprocity was crucial in relationships, both within and between groups. Disapproval in the form of reduced sharing, social isolation, and the threat of rejection from one’s group were powerful sanctions that reinforced conformity to group norms. Indeed, the importance of sharing within the primary group was strongly conveyed to children from infancy onward. These basic facts of small-scale, traditional life have been enduring and powerful from earliest mankind to the present day. They apply to the hunting and gathering societies in which our ancient ancestors spent several million years, to the extended families of agricultural village societies, and to the primary groups of the homogeneous neighborhoods in preindustrial towns of the past that foreshadowed modern industrial and postindustrial societies. Our ancient ancestors’ world began to change drastically with the onset of agriculture 10,000 years ago. The existing evidence clearly shows that—once humans developed agriculture, settled in larger population groups, accumulated goods, and came to rely on designated areas for growing food and grazing animals—a widespread intergroup hostility became common, and at times, severe. Patterns of intergroup violence in preindustrial societies have been confirmed and described in detail by anthropologists and historians. Whatever the evolutionary background and its biological legacy, the historical record clarifies that aggressive behavior between individuals and between groups has been a prominent feature of human experience for at least several thousand years. Everywhere in the world, aggression toward others has been facilitated by a pervasive human tendency toward harsh dichotomizing between the positively valued we and the negatively valued they. Such behavior has been easily learned, practiced in childhood play, encouraged by custom, and rewarded by most human societies.

Households in developing countries are exposed to a number of risks, including negative shocks to their health, nutrition, or income. These shocks can be related to poor living conditions or exogenous events such as natural disasters. In conflict-prone environments, political shocks add insecurity to an already volatile economic context. In the absence of functioning insurance and credit markets, these adverse events can trap households into poverty. This chapter presents research performed as part of MICROCON on the risks faced and the security and the coping mechanisms used by households and individuals in Rwanda and Burundi, two conflict-affected countries in central Africa. The authors present insights on poverty dynamics, health, nutrition, and mortality, as well as on social, risk, and time preferences.

Based on evidence collected during 18 months of fieldwork in rural Burundi, this chapter argues that to obtain accurate information about sensitive issues, ethnography does better than surveys because it is uniquely equipped to deal with issues of culture, trust, and contradiction. There are strong reasons to believe that even current best practices in survey methods may be missing systematic lies that ethnographic methods can often detect. This chapter shows how respondents answer questions about sensitive topics in unexpected ways and suggests a three-part classification of reasons people may have for modifying their responses. For example, an ethnographer’s interview techniques can produce more narratives about stigmatized behavior that ae more useful than those resulting from standard surveys. Whether the goal is to explain political violence, develop policy prescriptions to prevent and resolve conflict, or prosecute war crimes and crimes against humanity, rigorous ethnography arguably does a better job than surveys.

This chapter charts the formation of a women’s movement in Burundi following the outbreak of violence in 1993 which sought to end the armed conflict and to participate in the peace negotiations and details how women were able to include women’s rights in the Arusha Peace and Reconciliation Agreement for Burundi. The women sought to forge a gender-based identity by including women who were both Hutu and Tutsi and avoiding contentious issues. Women’s organizations—which were part of a transnational feminist network—at various levels sought to help Burundian women participate in the negotiations including UNIFEM New York. Through their intervention, an all-women’s peace conference was convened where the participants proposed clauses to include in the final peace agreement. The resulting clauses reflect international norms on women due to the links between Burundian civil society and transnational feminist networks, the involvement of representatives of international organizations, and the use of international human rights instruments in constructing the language.

This chapter outlines the motivation for undertaking the research presented here, and offers an account of the contexts for the peacebuilding-related activities in which the United Nations is involved: Burundi; Central African Republic; Guinea; Guinea-Bissau; Liberia; and Sierra Leone. The research design is explained, with an overview provided of both the theoretical framework supporting the research and the methodological approach taken. The methodology is a form of discourse analysis engaging both documentary and transcribed interview texts, and this chapter explains how the author uses the concepts of gender and space to structure the analysis in the rest of the book. The chapter also presents an analysis of the literature on peacebuilding to which the author seeks to make a contribution with this research.

We study the performance of the financial system in Burundi in mobilizing and allocating resources using a blend of methodological approaches drawing from: (1) industrial organization in examining the banking sector structure, and the behavior and profitability of financial intermediaries; (2) macroeconomic analysis with a focus on the effect of economic performance and policy framework on financial sector performance; and (3) political economy analysis highlighting the role of political governance and political instability, as well as ownership of financial institutions on allocative and distributional inefficiencies. We find that the core of the financial sector that has survived the worst of the economic and political crises of the last decades is highly profitable. Bank profitability hides financial sector weaknesses: a high level of fragmentation; a narrow credit market that favors “insiders” mostly affiliated with the political elites; a shortage of long-term stable resources; inefficient allocation of resources; and weak supervision and regulation. Access to finance remains an important challenge, especially for the “stranded middle” (middle income households and medium size firms) due to the “missing middle credit market”. Recent developments in the financial sector, such as penetration of foreign banks, may boost competition, financial innovation, and access to finance.

There is considerable anecdotal evidence that insurgent groups opportunistically use forests as advantageous terrain for guerrilla warfare and as a source of finance, mostly through taxing logging companies. This chapter presents these opportunistic dimensions and the links between forests, rebellions and forest-dwelling populations. Examples from Burundi, Cambodia and Liberia are provided.

This chapter compares the diaspora engagement initiatives of Rwanda and Burundi. Both nations recognize the potential of their diasporas, but they are at different stages of diaspora policy development. Both are also conflict-affected countries. Results show that Rwanda actively addresses the challenges by reaching out to its diaspora, focusing on diasporic unity and communication between diaspora groups and the Rwandan government, and embedding diaspora policy into long-term development plans. A lack of data, however, prevents an evaluation of the effectiveness of these efforts. By contrast, Burundi still needs to create the institutional environment for diaspora engagement. This chapter shows that for diaspora engagement initiatives to succeed, a high level of cooperation is needed between ministries, international organizations, and the diaspora. In conflict-affected societies such as Burundi and Rwanda, however, the most important condition for success is that the countries’ security situations become increasingly stable in the near future.