Political leadership and conflict resolution: an African example

Abstract

Challenges to post-conflict leadership in African states highlight the need for democratic capacity building, with clear participatory processes involving communities and the leadership as a necessary condition to mitigate new or resurrected conflicts. This article explores transformational leadership and how it relates to democratic capacity building in Rwanda. We argue that community capacity building through grassroots leadership is a necessary and sufficient ingredient for the development and sustenance of democracy in postconflict societies. Reconciliation through justice, political reforms including decentralisation, and women’s empowerment as critical variables in this process characterise a transformational agenda to gradually achieve stability at the grassroots. Despite dilemmas of justice and democracy, transformative leadership in Rwanda continues to evolve at both state and grassroots levels through processes based on indigenous knowledge and practices like gacaca and ingando to achieve the greater good of reconciliation.