Both Burundi and South Sudan experience intractable conflicts which national and international actors struggle to resolve. Efforts to consolidate the nation‐state and foster social cohesion seem to be unsuccessful. As has been well documented in the literature, top‐down efforts to facilitate social cohesion by international and national actors are not enough to foster sustainable peace. Yet the dynamics and actors involved in bottom‐up interventions for social cohesion are less well understood than elite interventions. This article contributes to a deeper understanding of the bottom‐up interventions and explores the vertical integration between top‐down and bottom‐up efforts at social cohesion that exist along the local, national, and international trajectory in the two cases. Particularly in contexts such as South Sudan and Burundi, which are characterized by societies that are held together through complex social and relational networks, and in which informal governance and conflict resolution mechanisms hold high levels of legitimacy, this under‐researched aspect of social cohesion may hold critical insights in terms of consolidating nation‐states. The article provides an argument for the consideration of bottom‐up approaches for more integration of social cohesion mechanisms.

The post-liberation peacebuilding in South Sudan, which largely drew from liberal peace theory, was employed between 2005 (after the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) and before the referendum, secession, and independence in 2011) and December 2013 (when it imploded into a civil conflict) and proved insufficient to sustain the fragile peace that briefly existed after the country’s secession from Sudan. After a protracted conflict lasting almost half a decade and the presence of multiple peace actors, the lack of a comprehensive and coordinated peacebuilding strategy proved detrimental. This failure is partly due to poor coordination between stakeholders and lack of local/domestic legitimacy, leading to insufficient peacebuilding and an aggravation of the 2013 conflict. Over the years, liberal peacebuilding strategies, which emphasize formal institution-building and statebuilding in fragile and conflict-affected environments, continue to produce mixed to poor results and fragile peace. This decline has resulted in the shifting of discourses and operations within peacebuilding, a paradigm shift that pays greater attention to localization and the local context in the conceptualization of peacebuilding objectives and strategies. This transformation promotes local ownership and inclusivity in peace processes and their dividends. The dialogue on inclusive peace has thus gained momentum, bearing a need to fully engage both states and societies in this process. The “local” in peacebuilding forms an important resource when solving root causes of conflicts, as in South Sudan, by improving awareness of the cultural and historical diversity in a given context.

In Africa, legitimation and claims to the legitimate use of force are often challenged by the problematic nature of ethnic diversity, amongst other things. Although ethnicity and diversity are not the problems in themselves, the politicisation of ethnicity is. In this paper, we link this to a history of colonisation which clustered multiple ethnic groups together within single sovereign entities around the continent, as well as the current realities of coloniality which has prevented states within the continent from imagining and transcending the European artefact and design of the modern state in Africa. We link the exploratory term coloniality in statebuilding to the failure of African states to overcome the politicisation of ethnicity and ethnic diversity in order to mitigate the problematic nature of democracy in modern African states. This failure leads to challenges of legitimacy in any given state, and ultimately the states’ claim to the legitimate use of force. The resultant symptoms and indicators of such challenges are manifest in the rise of various insurgencies, separatism, and other forms of insecurity. The cases of Kenya, South Sudan, Nigeria, and Somalia are briefly discussed in this article, highlighting the problematic nature of the claims to the legitimate use of force, legitimacy, and the resultant political ethnicity with all its consequences for these states.

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