By Adagbo Onoja
The first point to make about this book is that it passes the test on most of the crucial determinants of a good book. Saying so very early is vital, given the reservations about the quality of books produced in and around Nigeria today. That reservation is so thick that a Vice-Chancellor had to clarify recently that when he says that his academics must publish or think of another job, he does not mean publishing in ‘anything goes’ journals or non-descript, backwater publishing houses but reputable ones. The VC’s concern must be informed by the high degree of methodological illiteracy that define many essays and book projects these days.
It is the evidence that suggests strongly that as miserable as university funding is in contemporary Nigeria, there is also the threat to quality education in the disappearance of Methodology from much of what goes on in most Nigerian universities since the mid-1980s. Left with just Research Methods (as opposed to Methodology), it is not surprising that products of the university system are generally lacking in the meta-theoretical rootedness to be able to synthesise the rich empirics the information revolution has placed within the reach of nearly all of us. Without being able to synthesise or add value to such empirics, they are largely seen as lacking competitiveness and unemployable.
The argument here is that this book does not fall in the category of desperate publications. In fact the opening chapter is a big deal in the author’s attempt to reconcile neo-positivism with interpretivism in unpacking inter-faith dialogue. Whether he has been successful or not would depend on each particular reader. What is important is that he opens an important front for scholarly exertion. There is thus a sense in which this book is not the type that comes with readymade answers thereby closing off the problem under discussion from further interrogation.
In all, there are 20 chapters. The diversity of the topics by different contributors makes it difficult to locate a core beyond saying that all issues treated fall within the broad space of the field we all know and call ‘Peace and Conflict Studies’ today. A total of three chapters are dedicated to conflict theorising; about four chapters tackle conflict management from different entry points, there is a chapter on religion and conflict just as there is one on international organisations; on women and conflict; on border management and national security. There are two different chapters on early warning and one on communication and conflict management.
The comprehensiveness of the coverage means that this text also functions as an update on the very solid Introduction to Peace and Conflict Studies in West Africa edited by Shedrack Best (and in which Prof Okey Ibeanu, for example, could be argued to have written his best academic work in the way he extracted Peace from Political Theory); Communicating Peace and Conflict, edited by Isaac Albert, et all; Confronting the “Gods” of Ethnicity by Adele Jinadu; Jos Crisis: Challenges and Opportunities for Nation Building by Abdul-Lateef Adegbite and The Smouldering Peace on the Plateau: Mapping Conflict and Prospects for Lasting Peace in Plateau State by a team led by Chom Bagu.
It cannot be said that all chapters have got the same level of coherence and critical radius but, even then, there is nothing to disagree with Professor Sam Amdi, the Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences, Veritas University, Abuja when he declared in the Foreword that “the discussion of the themes and perspectives as they pertain to peace and conflict is very timely given the current scenario of multifaceted conflicts in the country”. Certainly, there is satisfactory invocation of key texts in the field, (Peace and Conflict is not yet a discipline) as well as reference to what one may call turning points in the politics of peace since the collapse of the Berlin Wall.
A book is not great because it is free of one inadequacy or another or absence of controversies. A book is great if it provokes reactions to it one way or the other. The editors and publishers of this book should, therefore, expect critics to take them up on the project.
A plausible area of disagreement would most likely be the taken for granted use of the concept of interdisciplinarity or multidisciplinarity. These are the staple stuff across the disciplines nowadays but there is something hotchpotch about them to a point of meaninglessness. When a Marxist historian is speaking on any topic, there is nothing s/he says that a Marxist anthropologist, political scientist, philosopher, peace scholar, economist, sociologist, international relations expert or literary critic would not understand, baring minor differences in peculiar jargons. The same thing applies when a critical theorist is intervening on a topic, s/he is equally accessible to those who approach knowledge from that standpoint. The point then is that it is not multidisciplinarity but the cross-cutting nature of what Prof Patrick Thaddeus Jackson calls ‘wagers’ or a scholar’s philosophical hook-up. What this means is that the fact that everyone is using interdisciplinarity or multidisciplinarity every now and then doesn’t make it right unless someone comes up with a conceptual framework that can stand critical scrutiny.
A second point that critics are likely to go after about the book is the failure of the editing process to knock off this pervasive self-understanding of students and even teachers of Peace and Conflict across Nigeria as a field which is equipped with formulae, mechanisms and practices to resolve conflicts rather than a space of hard theoretical reflection, first and foremost. It is a wrongheaded direction founded on a false distinction between theory and practice. Theory and practice are co-constitutive and inseparable. To theorise is to practicalise too and any attempt at being practical outside of a situated sense of a conflict can lead to what was called ‘disjointed empiricism’ in a big debate here in Nigeria in the early 1980s or what Eskor Toyo spoke of as a ‘system that cannot systematize’, his mockery of System Theory that once held Political Science hostage. Perhaps, the elders in the field may need to make a collective intervention early enough.
These observations about the book are areas that can easily be sorted out in the next edition of the book and make it a stronger text in the field. Even as it is, it is a compliment to the joint publishers – the UFUK Dialogue Foundation and the Centre for Peace and Development, (CEPAD) of Veritas University, Abuja.
Mr. Onoja is an Editorial Associate at Intervention