Introduction

This volume is an interdisciplinary study of conflict with the overriding focus being an in-depth examination of ways and means to promote reconciliation and reconstruction in postconflict societies. Armed conflicts continue to occur in many parts of the world and have escalated over the last two decades.1 In Africa, over one quarter of the continent’s countries were embroiled in conflict in the late 1990s.2 At the end of 2002, a total of 25 countries were experiencing ongoing or sporadic conflict. Thirty countries are emerging from recent conflicts.3 The United Nations report has observed that today’s armed conflicts are predominantly internal, with regional and subregional repercussions; and the victims of those conflicts are disproportionately civilians. While during the First World War, only 5 percent of all casualties were civilians, during the 1990s civilians accounted for up to 90 percent of casualties.4