This presentation centred on the different issues relating to conflict systems such as DDR politics, politicization of ethno-religious identities, natural resource management, cross-border trafficking, Youth, piracy, climate change, etc.
Prof. Omar Ndongo, one of the speakers, described conflict as a situation when two parties are in loggerheads on something. He said conflict can be very positive; that sometimes progress comes out of conflict. "So there is one part of conflict is very positive," he said.
The other type of conflict, he said, is where the parties cannot really solve an issue which often leads to tension; that it is this disagreement which leads to tension and confrontation or violent conflict.
Prof. Ndongo said violent conflict is difficult to avoid. Furthermore he said some violent conflicts can be positive. He said violent conflict can be distructive and it is also very difficult to sustain.
He said violence follow a cycle and several features of violence come together and create tension. Among the features he mentioned are sculpturing and factoring,that it is not necessarily conflict that you can have ready peace but that peace would sooner or later create conflict.
Prof. Ndongo cautioned that when you have peace you need to be very careful if not some factors would emerge and eventually turn to conflict. He also talked about accelerated conflict; that is the type that is not yet open, such as unemployment.
He said that when people are looking for jobs they don't have it, it accelerates their consciousness; adding that one needs to put mechanisms to be able to prevent it from not turning it into violent conflict.
He said you just need a trigger to handle the max, before they will come out of control. He spoke about limitation of power which he opined some times lead to conflict. He also talked about settler conflict which he said is also another form of conflict which can sometimes be dangerous.
He called on leaders to be careful of conflict and always try to foresee whether what is developing may lead to mass killing or not. He said one of the roles of the civil society is to alert the government on things that are happening and things they think may lead to conflict or mass killings.
He said most of the time when conflict happens in Africa the western powers would come and entertain without permission, instead it is the leader of that country who should take up his people's interest first to prevent it from happening.
ECOWAS was created as a regional community mainly to integrate the economies of member states. He said they have very few conflicts but said now there is a need for ECOWAS to move away from economics to conflict resolution due to the increasing number of military takeovers; that though they realize that no development is possible if peace is lacking.
He said the most important factor to prevent conflict is Justice e.g; "that if you are suppressed you can go and seek for Justice and if you are treated fairly you become happy but he said it becomes otherwise if you are not treated accordingly, you become unhappy".
He cited Liberia and Sierra leone as examples and said we should also study the root causes of the conflicts. He concluded that every country should take Liberia and Sierra Leone as examples and look at the factors that make the war and try to put mechanisms in place to prevent it from reoccurring in the sub region.
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