| dc.description.abstract | Africa‘s Great Lakes Region has recently experienced political strife, violent conflicts and population displacements with severe humanitarian consequences. While these events have clearly revolved around political struggles for the control of the state, recent research point to the scarce natural resources in the region as structural causes of violent conflicts.The main aim of the study was to examine the extent to which scarce natural resources have contributed to violent conflicts in the Great Lake region. The criteria to be used to analyze the data collected included categorizing the themes derived from each category of questions, coding the themes, tabulating them where necessary, summarizing the major components and propositions of the study and cross checking the facts and discrepancies of the facts. Data was analyzed quantitatively by making interpretation of the findings based on the description.
The findings revealed that the shift in the strategies of regional governments from complicity in natural resource conflicts, to greater willingness to explore a new, legitimate, and peaceful conflict mitigation mechanisms in the Great Lakes is real. Independent auditing and harmonized standards for conflict-free natural resource utilization is essential in pressuring country governments to mitigate exploitation of natural resources by armed groups and in signifying to conflict-affected communities that human rights infractions matter to central and regional governments. These governments, and some powerful circles of interests within the great lakes region, are calculating how they can continue to profit from the natural resources without incurring costs associated with violation of proposed certification schemes. The study found that much of the shift in government positions on natural resource trade is being driven by the current and anticipated costs of trading in the scarce natural resources.
The study concluded that Regional bodies and institutions in East Africa are playing a more significant role as platforms for interstate collaboration on security issues and conflict management. Protracted conflicts, regional insurgencies, and crossborder criminality stress border and national-level response systems, and regional organizations are becoming more essential for monitoring, prevention, and crossborder response mechanisms. In recent years, intergovernmental relations have improved across much of the region, particularly between Uganda, Kenya, Ethiopia, and South Sudan, providing new opportunities for conflict management. IGAD‗s aspirations to build more effective conflict early warning and mitigation capacity are institutionalized in CEWARN, operational since 2003.
The study recommended that for economic cooperation and peace building to become mutually reinforcing in the Great Lakes Region, the regional organizations needs to refine their mandate and areas of engagement in light of the instability and capacity of governments in the region through the following ways: In the economic cooperation pillar alone, large-scale infrastructure projects can represent highly contested natural resources worth fighting over. Further, initiatives such as a natural resource certification scheme risk duplicating efforts at the international level, which are already proving costly and often ineffective. The added value of the regional organizations‘ engagement in such activities must be better articulated. Regional organizations would be better off focusing on more security-related issues. | en |
