Unpacking the social legitimation of peace(building) in urban Mozambique
Speaker: Manuel Barroso Sevillano
Recent years have seen a growing academic awareness of the complexity of peace and the importance of urban spaces for peacebuilding. This highlights the relevance of a comprehensive understanding of local-urban dynamics in contemporary peace and dialogue processes for research and policy. This GLAC seminar will examine this question through the case study of Mozambique, which has long been regarded as an international ‘success story’ in peacebuilding. However, from 2013 on, two decades after the 1992 General Peace Agreement, the country has faced renewed episodes of political violence, armed conflict, and peace initiatives. More recently, five years after the signing of the latest 2019 Peace and National Reconciliation Agreement, from October 2024 to February 2025, Mozambique’s major urban centres experienced an unprecedented post-election period of social unrest, marked by widespread protests contesting the official results and disproportionate state violence. On 5 March 2025, the newly sworn-in President of Mozambique and of the ruling FRELIMO party, together with nine other political parties, signed the “Political Commitment for an Inclusive National Dialogue”. This new accord was a political gesture to ease tensions arising from the post-election crisis. However, it was not conceived as an end in itself but as a means to initiate an ‘inclusive’ national dialogue to address, at least in principle, the deep-rooted issues that led to the violent post-election crisis. This GLAC seminar is based on the ongoing YUFE4Postdocs research project, SLP_Social Legitimation of Peace in ‘Contested Cities’. Peacebuilding and Post-conflict Governance in Urban Mozambique. Drawing on prior research and complemented by two months of field research in the cities of Maputo and Beira in 2025, this seminar will explore the National Inclusive Dialogue process through the lens of peace(building) legitimacy.