Dr Eka Ikpe and Dr Sarah Njeri, African Leadership Centre, King’s College London – Written evidence (ZAF0023)

Organisation and Personal Introduction

The African Leadership Centre is part of the School of Global Affairs, King’s College London. The Centre explores issues of peace, leadership, development and security in Africa and the Global South. Together with partners, it contributes to knowledge production, informs and influences debate, and offers innovative teaching and learning, at postgraduate level, across the noted themes. It has a semi-autonomous research and training sister centre in Nairobi, Kenya that is the product of a collaboration with the University of Nairobi.

Dr Ikpe is a Senior Lecturer and Dr Njeri is a Researcher at the African Leadership Centre.

Executive Summary

1. Mine action occurs as part of wider peacebuilding and reconstruction activities in conflict affected contexts;
2. Although the benefits for mine action are more visible during the humanitarian phase, as other contexts such as Angola and Somaliland have shown, mine action remains as important for latter developmental phases;
3. Mine clearance is an important aspect of mine action but there is need to be concerned with other elements including mine risk education and victim assistance.

Support to mine action within an integrated post-conflict peacebuilding framework

While acknowledging the complexities of competing priorities in support to conflict-affected contexts, it is important that the UK government continues its important support to Mine Action programmes in Africa as part of peacebuilding, as it has done to pivotal actors including the HALO Trust.  This paper highlights three key points that should inform the UK’s continued support to mine action:  mine action occurs as part of wider peacebuilding and reconstruction activities in conflict affected contexts; although the benefits for mine action are more visible during the humanitarian phase, as other contexts such as Angola and Somaliland have shown mine action remains as important for latter developmental phases;[1]  and attention has tended to be on the very important mine clearance aspect of mine action but there is need to be concerned with other elements including mine risk education and victim assistance.

1. An integrated approach to mine action provides a continued opportunity for incorporating and integrating wider development and reconstruction responses (from actors including the UK Department for International Development) that have far reaching economic benefits for societies in Africa. For example, in Somaliland, clearing landmines from grazing lands as well as strategic infrastructural sites improves livestock production as well as rehabilitation of roads alongside the improved access to veterinary services and foreign investment.[2] Another exemplar of the significance of a comprehensive approach is in the centrality of land release as part of mine action and mine clearance and the impact this can have on extant complexities around access to, use and ownership of land. For instance, landmine clearance is important in conflict settings for the return of refugees and those internally displaced, agricultural recovery and food security, broad economic recovery, etc. It is important to consider these realities alongside questions of land rights in associated policy formulation and implementation, planning, programming, and evaluation processes. This is significant for centring local priorities, policies, policy actors, communities, practices in making the most of the extensive support the UK government alongside other actors (including national actors as in the case of Angola) have put into mine action. As such mine clearance is significant as an element of a comprehensive understanding and deployment of post-conflict reconstruction activities.

2. Mine action offers a great opportunity for long-term post conflict gains.  As an activity it has intrinsic potential for immediate peacebuilding and for long term developmental gains.  A response that acknowledges mine action’s gains more robustly, we argue, is achieved from a coherent approach that focuses beyond such immediate security and humanitarian gains.[3] Attention tends to be focused on the short term of about 6 months in line with cost-benefit analyses. Yet a focus on this short time span misses out the more complex outcomes that can occur over the longer term and very fundamental developmental phases.

3. An aspect of this is due to the difficulty of understanding the longer-term impact of mine clearance, that includes lack of data resources that could inform such research. Yet national government, local private and international mine action agencies, such as the HALO Trust, have extensive raw data that could be better collated and analyzed in collaboration with researchers to support knowledge building on the longer-term impact and needs of mine action; access to data from the HALO Trust (facilitated by research grant support from the UK Economic and Social Science Research Council) has been immensely helpful for our own research.  There is a dearth of resources to support the utility of this valuable and rare data from these sources. It would be important to see support to mine action pay attention also to this concern. Mine action support should be within an integrated response that incorporates a range of issues across phases and time periods.

4. A persistent critique to peacebuilding interventions such as mine action is the omission of learning lessons from previous interventions to inform policy. It will be prudent for the UK government to draw on the many ‘lessons learned’ from supporting and engaging in support for Mine Action with the wealth of research available (and greater support to new research) to better inform responses and programmes.

5. Within an integrated approach, mine action should engage various aspects in addition to mine clearance. This remains significant also in paying attention to a longer time spectrum beyond the shorter-term humanitarian concerns. For instance, there is continued need for support for survivors including in countries where mine clearance is no longer an ongoing intervention (this can be focus on mental health of amputees etc). For many survivors in conflict-affected contexts where the general health services and wider facilities remain challenging these conditions may require greater support.  In addition, systems of mental health support for affected communities and survivors is of such importance that the REVIVE Campaign is undertaking an enquiry on the psychological harm experienced by survivors who loose limbs, sight, and suffer from complex injuries.

6. Context-specific mine risk education can also constitute an important concern beyond the humanitarian phase into the longer-term. Research on Somaliland has shown instances where communities can be reticent to utilise cleared land over longer timespans.[4] Mine Awareness and Risk Education also plays a crucial role in addressing the issues of fear amongst a returning population. Thus, supporting risk education for displaced populations in countries that do not necessarily have mine action programs or are not mine affected for example South Sudanese and Somali refugees in Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia or elsewhere can be a way of addressing this.

7. There is the need for moving beyond the standardised one size fits all approach.  A critique to interventions such as mine action is that they favour a standardised template-like approach. However, over time, there has been a realisation that such an approach does not work all the time.  Each context has different contextual factors that inevitably challenge such standardised approaches. Therefore, a nuanced response is needed for each place of intervention. Standardised templates can have their use but not all the time.

8. Support to mine clearance should increasingly pay attention also to environmental assistance as part of mine action, thus avoiding further harm to human health and the environment. In dealing with the effects of violent conflict, remediation can take many forms. It may borrow techniques from waste management, erosion control or public health, to name a few.

9. Recommendations of this submission are as follows: Support to mine clearance and mine action initiatives should be undertaken with understanding that they constitute an element of wider peacebuilding and post-conflict reconstruction activities; support to mine action initiatives should include attention to longer-term time spans with attention both humanitarian and developmental concerns; support to mine clearance activities should support research activities especially collaborations across mine action organisations that are local, national and international and academics; mine clearance activities should be supported alongside other mine action concerns even with regard to longer time periods; and environmental concerns should be part of support to mine clearance and mine action activities.

Conclusion

This submission is informed by the work of researchers who continue to work on the interactions between mine clearance and economic recovery and reconstruction as part of peacebuilding. In this regard the researchers were part of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council Global Challenges Research Fund- funded research project titled ‘A Clear Road Ahead’. This is an interdisciplinary research project across engineering, political economy of development, peace and security studies and economics with researchers from the King’s African Leadership Centre, King’s Department of Engineering, London Business School also with support from the ESRC Impact Acceleration Fund.

Received 5 February 2020