[Studies in Strategic Peacebuilding] Daniel Philpott, Gerard Powers - Strategies of Peace (2010, Oxford University Press) - libgen.lc (1)

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Strategic Peacebuilding:
An Overview
John Paul Lederach and R. Scott Appleby
As faculty members of a peace institute, we study worldwide efforts
to reduce violence, resolve conflict, and build peace, and we regularly
receive inquiries and requests from people confronting a variety of
challenges posed by intense conflict. Consider the following examples,
drawn from well-known cases and from our own experiences,
keeping in mind the following question: what are the “strategic”
dimensions of building peace in this context?
Following a decade of struggle, the African nation of Mozambique
gained its independence from Portugal in June 1975. Twice the size
of California, the new nation was plagued by poverty, a 90 percent
illiteracy rate, and periodic, devastating droughts. The 230,000 Portuguese
settlers who fled in the mid-1970s left the country bereft of most
skilled, professional, and business people; they also took working capital
and sabotaged equipment as they departed. Therefore, the economy
at independence was in a shambles. Samora Machel, the military
leader of the independence movement known as FRELIMO (the Front
for the Liberation of Mozambique), became the new nation’s first president.
FRELIMO’s Marxist-Leninist ideology inspired opposition in
the form of the Mozambique National Resistance, or RENAMO, which
was composed of former Portuguese soldiers, disgruntled FRELIMO
deserters, and common criminals. RENAMO launched a guerrilla war
in the early 1980s directed at destabilizing FRELIMO. By 1992, the
RENAMO insurgency had left over a million Mozambicans dead and
had displaced 6 to 8 million others.
Throughout the civil war, the religious communities of Mozambique
constituted the nation’s civil society. The Catholic Church,