COVID-19 Conflict & Resilience Monitor – 19 May 2021

Indeed, in 2020, as we were planning to celebrate major instruments for the advancement of women’s rights to peace and development, namely the Beijing Declaration and Platform of Action and the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 (UNSCR 1325), the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic erupted, causing deaths and disruptions all over the world. The pandemic demonstrated once more that in times of crisis, women and girls bear the brunt of the impact and are the ones at the front of the risk.

We live in a peculiar moment in history in which prevailing threats to peace and stability have collided with a pandemic that occurs once in a century. For the African continent, it is rather a precarious moment in which our realities and limitations have come to the fore, more than in previous decades. 

For many Chadians, news of the sudden death of President Idris Déby Itno on 20 April 2021, crowned the past year as an annus horribilis, while sending shockwaves through the wider Sahel and around the world. Sixty-eight-year-old Déby, who took power in 1990 when his rebel forces deposed then-President and autocratic leader Hissène Habré, died from gunshot wounds sustained on the frontlines of fighting rebels belonging to a group called “Front pour l’alternance et la concorde au Tchad” (French acronym, FACT) in the north of Chad. The shock news came just a day after the veteran ruler won his sixth term as president amid boycotts from the main political opposition.

The changing conflict contexts have refocused our attention on the theory and practice of conflict management and the need for transforming the ways in which we seek to Silence the Guns in Africa. In the 1990s the conflict contexts demanded that peace be sought internally between identifiable warring parties with the ability to do harm, usually government and one or two rebel groups seeking access to political power; that mediation went beyond ceasefire agreements to deliver more comprehensive peace accords; and peacekeeping broadened to encompass multidimensional peace support operations.