Externally Organized Peace Meeting among Pastoral Groups in the Conflict Zone of North East Africa

Abstract

Many inter-ethnic conflicts have been arising among pastoralists, who live in the border area of Ethiopia, Kenya and Sudan. Recently, external actors have seriously started to intervene in this area to mitigate such conflicts and construct peace. Therefore researchers are expected to make discreet efforts to examine outside interventions so that they could give positive influences to local communities. In this paper, I focused on two peace meetings of pastoralists that were organized by governments and local NGOs in 2006, and examined the problems and possibilities which outside intervention could have toward peace construction. As a result, three following points were drawn. First, I analyzed that intervenient arranged the meetings by appropriating the cultural elements of indigenous peace meeting style, so as to make local people easily involve in the meetings. Second, I pointed out that peace meeting had both the risk of aggravation of antagonistic relations between different ethnic groups, as well as the possibility of constructive resolutions of such problems. Third, I showed that local people used the opportunity of the meeting to make friendly relations with “enemies”, and recovered mutual visits between them.