Description
Mozambique’s peace process during the 1990s has been widely celebrated as one of the most prominent cases of a successful war-to-peace transition in Africa, and subsequently informed both peacebuilding theory and practice. However, Mozambique’s recent history presents a telling case of post-conflict state-building and the difficulties of securing durable peace. Two decades after the General Peace Agreement was signed and subsequent disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration (DDR) took place, Mozambique’s warring parties, Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (Frelimo) and Resistência Nacional Moçambicana (Renamo), returned to armed conflict. This paper will reflect Mozambique’s peace process and the power sharing arrangements it created as well as the political economic foundations that shaped the country over the two-decade period before the recurrence of armed conflict in 2013. Moreover, the article will explore the temporal dimensions of the renewed armed conflict to uncover why, after two decades, Renamo returned to violence. The re-emergence of civil war in Mozambique challenges existing assumptions about why civil conflicts recur and whether disarmament projects can in fact create conditions for durable peace. This paper will argue that Mozambique’s incomplete peacebuilding process, power-sharing arrangement, imperfect democratic transition and political economy post-civil war failed to create conditions for durable peace.
