Society For Peace Studies And Practice (Spsp)

As a civil society, the Society for Peace Studies and Practice, SPSP, seeks to integrate peace scholarship and practice to advance the development of the culture of peace. SPSP provides a collaborative space for peace scholars and practitioners from various areas of specialization to creatively share and synthesize ideas and experiences to evolve a more holistic approach to the understanding and practice of peace. Sustainable peace, the goal of multi-level intervention, has been elusive in Africa partly because efforts of state and civil society actors in the quest for peace have not coalesced into the type of levelling focus that could serve to coordinate and translate these various peace actions into unified achievement. Consequently, peace and conflict studies and practices in Africa have been defined more by unfruitful competition than by a productive collaboration between peace scholars and conflict management practitioners. SPSP, an initiative that emerged from the discourse between scholars and practitioners on the Peace and Conflict Studies Programme of the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, was formed in 2005 to meet this challenge. It is a truism that peace scholars need the experience of the practitioners for honing their context-specific analyses; the practitioners equally need scientific insight and familiarity with current findings of the best peace practice that research provides. SPSP aims to maximize the untapped potentials inherent in the integration of peace study and practice through: joint-project designs, joint facilitation of operational strategies in programmes, collaborative monitoring and evaluations, and other opportunities that creative cooperation between peace scholars and practitioners will lend to the quest of transforming conflict energies emerging from inevitable and often violent social interactions in contemporary Africa to peace resources.