The Atlantic Council’s Michael S. Ansari Africa Center joined the Brenthurst Foundation, the British Peace Support Training Team, and the RAND Corporation to sponsor an international dialogue on The Economic Dimension of Peacebuilding, which took place March 2-4 at the Tswalu Kalahari Reserve in South Africa.
The meeting of leading practitioners and scholars, many of whom were focused on Africa, was co-chaired by General Sir David Richards, Chief of the Defence Staff of the United Kingdom; the Honorable Erastus Mwencha, Deputy Chairperson of the African Union Commission; the Honorable Luísa Días Diogo, former Prime Minister of Mozambique; and General (ret) Richard Myers, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the United States. The event was hosted at Tswalu, South Africa’s largest private game reserve, by Jonathan Oppenheimer.
J. Peter Pham, director of the Ansari Africa Center, represented it at the meeting, which aimed to identify best practice in one of the areas of greatest weakness (and frequent failure) of peacebuilding missions: getting local economies up and running. The dialogue at Tswalu will open a process to better understand what characterizes failure or success in post-conflict economic reconstruction efforts, how to best transition from stabilization to development, and which areas and methods of expenditure can reap the greatest rewards.