A house of cards in Central Africa?

Has widening ECCAS' economic agenda to include peace and security cooperation stretched this community too thin?

Date: 2015-06-02

Time: 10:00 to 11:30

Venue: Conference room , ISS Pretoria , Block C , Brooklyn Court , 361 Veale Street , map

RSVP: Penelope Mandula
Phone: +27 12 346 9500
Email: [email protected]

For more than 20 years, Central Africa has been one of Africa’s most conflict-ridden regions, enduring an infinite number of wars, coups and political crises. As one of the African Peace and Security Architecture’s building blocks, the Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS) has consequently widened its economic agenda to prioritise regional peace and security cooperation.

This seminar assesses ECCAS’ ability to deal with peace and security challenges. Relying on expert interviews conducted in Libreville in April 2015, findings of ongoing research offer a multi-faceted perspective on ECCAS and its conflict prevention capacities. Major challenges to Central Africa’s regional cooperation, as well as obstacles that limit ECCAS’ capacities and performance in conflict prevention will also be discussed.

The seminar will be held under the Chatham House Rule. There will be no live webcast.

Chair: Stephanie Wolters, Head, Conflict Prevention and Risk Analysis division, ISS Pretoria 

Speaker: Dr Angela Meyer, ISS guest researcher, Organisation for International Dialogue and Conflict Management (IDC), Vienna, Austria

Respondent: Dr Paul-Simon Handy, Senior Research Associate, ISS