Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Global Governance

Program Name/Specialization

Conflict and Security

Faculty/School

Faculty of Arts

First Advisor

Timothy Donais

Advisor Role

Supervisor

Second Advisor

Alistair Edgar

Advisor Role

Committee Member

Third Advisor

Bonny Ibhawoh

Advisor Role

Committee Member

Abstract

Infrastructures for peace have been promoted as a means of embedding peacebuilding’s commitment to local ownership within durable national institutions. Ghana, the first country to establish one under UNDP sponsorship, has long been treated as the model’s paradigmatic success story. Drawing on over six months of fieldwork conducted between 2018 and 2019— including archival research in Accra, and interviews and focus groups with Peace Council personnel, civil society representatives, traditional authorities, and party-aligned youth across Ghana’s regions—this dissertation offers a sustained empirical account of how that infrastructure functions in practice.

I contend that Ghana’s Peace Council system constitutes a genuine, if imperfect, innovation in the institutionalization of peacebuilding which has helped to open a modest space for civil society to shape the conflict-management priorities of the state. Much of what initially rendered the concept appealing to proponents of the local turn has, however, been lost during its institutionalization, filtered through both the path-dependent assumptions of the UNDP and the extraverted, clientelist incentive structures which characterize Ghana’s political settlement. The empirical chapters of this dissertation, organized by descending geographic scale from the national centre through the regional, local and community levels, trace the consequences of this fitful operationalization. I offer two major conclusions. First, empirically, the capacity of Ghana’s Peace Councils to deliver inclusive and locally owned peacebuilding diminishes the further one moves from the center of state power outward to the communities it was designed to serve. Second, theoretically, I suggest that peace infrastructures premised on harnessing “the local” are likely to inherit, rather than escape, the political, economic and social inequalities which constitute that locality.

Convocation Year

2027

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