The 2018 Southern Voices Network for Peacebuilding (SVNP) Conference will be held from 16-19 July at the Institute for Peace and Security Studies (IPSS) at Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia. This year, the theme of the conference is “National, Regional, and Global Infrastructures for Peace in Africa.” Participants in the conference will comprise mostly heads of organizations and senior officials from the SVNP, along with external stakeholders and practitioners from Africa and beyond. The conference will include both private and public sessions on topics related to the overall theme. Panel discussions will explore the nature, scale, and scope of the infrastructures in place for peacebuilding at the national, regional, and global levels; evaluate the extent to which they are functioning; and, provide best practices and ways forward for building off of or reforming current infrastructures.

Join us on Tuesday, 17 July for public session on “Country Case Studies: Peacebuilding in South Sudan, Rwanda, Libya, and Burundi.” Experts will present successes, challenges, lessons learned, and best practices from peacebuilding efforts in these countries. Areas of discussion will include what worked well at the national, regional, and global levels, as well as areas for future work and attention. Each panelist will evaluate the some of the successes and failures in each case and identify actionable recommendations that can be applied elsewhere. These lessons learned will provide the foundation for subsequent exploration of the roles of peacebuilding architectures at various levels, which will take place in following sessions.

The Southern Voices Network for Peacebuilding (SVNP) is a continent-wide network of African policy and research organizations that works with the Africa Program to bring African analyses and perspectives to key issues in U.S.-Africa relations. Funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York since 2011, the project provides avenues for African researchers to engage with, inform, and exchange perspectives with U.S. and international policymakers in order to develop the most appropriate, cohesive, and inclusive policy frameworks for the issues of peacebuilding and state-building in Africa.