Intrastate Conflict and International Peacekeeping Operations in the Central African Republic (CAR)

The Post-Cold war world politics witnessed a dramatic shift, while proxy wars and interstate conflicts peculiar to the Cold war era significantly declined, an intense trend of intrastate conflict began to manifest. The gruesome and atrocious nature of such violence with its concomitant trans-border effects attracted intervention from the international communities with intention of rescuing civilians and restoring peace and order. Records of successive peacekeeping interventions has shown that approaches are rather curative, which are geared towards a mere violence mitigation than a holistic conflict prevention mechanism. Despite massive troop deployment by the international community in the Central African Republic CAR, widespread and grave violation of human rights is not halted, leading to further escalations and the entanglement of the mission in the conflict. Most studies on humanitarian intervention focused largely on post-conflict intervention and this study attempts to critique this post-cold war posture and argue for a humanitarian intervention based on conflict prevention. The failure of the international community to stop the humanitarian crisis in the CAR underscores the need for this study on conflict prevention. Secondary data is adopted in the course of this study, using descriptive method of analysis to measure intensity of violence and the impact of the international peacekeeping operations in containing the conflict situation in the CAR. The following finding and recommendations are made: International actors predominantly share a pessimistic view of CAR, coupled with a general lack of commitment in the conflict and misunderstanding of the country’s internal dynamics. This perception shapes the type of engagement privileged by the international community in the CAR, which is mainly reactive in nature and designed to simply stabilize the country for the sake of regional affairs that are deemed to be of greater importance. The dominant reactive nature of the engagement in CAR produces an unsuccessful response, hence the need to reach an effective conflict prevention approach; International interventions in the CAR should be reoriented towards addressing state governance and the drivers of violence.