U.S. Institute of Peace Peace Watch

Short Takes

Africa, Front and Center
The U.S. government's executive branch will be paying much more attention to Africa in the coming months, with a series of cabinet-level trips to the continent scheduled through 1998, says U.S. Institute of Peace executive fellow John Prendergast, former director of the Horn of Africa Project at the Center of Concern in Washington. As an executive fellow, Prendergast has been assigned as director of African affairs at the National Security Council through a special agreement between the Institute and the Clinton administration. The White House has extended his assignment so that he can help prepare for the president's scheduled trip to Africa in March. Before accompanying Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright on her recent seven-nation tour of Africa, Prendergast discussed "Crisis and Opportunity: U.S. Policy in the Horn and East and Central Africa" at an Institute current issues briefing December 4. Most of the briefing was off the record.

Although the administration's policy will continue to focus on crisis prevention, one major objective will be to foster the creation of democratic institutions and widen the stake in the development process, Prendergast said. In Secretary Albright's address to the Organization of African Unity during her Africa trip, she elaborated on these policy priorities. "Today we have a choice," Albright said. "We can pursue short-sighted rivalries, seek short-term gains, and make only commitments of short duration. Or we can decide to move forward from the failures and recriminations of the past (such as the administration's failure to act to stop the genocide in Rwanda) and begin to forge pragmatic, enduring responses to the immense challenges we face."

International Affairs, Online
The Jeannette Rankin Library at the U.S. Institute of Peace is gathering and preparing digital copies of peace agreements that have emerged from inter- and intrastate conflicts since 1989. "Peace agreements, although they are public documents, often are hard to locate," says Margarita Studemeister, library director. "We hope the collection will facilitate worldwide access to information on the prevention, management, and resolution of international conflict."

Studemeister discussed the library's endeavor at a December 5 meeting of the International Affairs Librarians Group, hosted by the Institute. More than 60 librarians and information professionals attended the event to hear about the development of an international affairs digital library, and specifically the importance of the Foreign Affairs Documents Collection (FADC), an interagency digital library project currently under development. The FADC will provide access to unclassified U.S. foreign policy documents on the World Wide Web, said William Y. Arms of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI). Arms designed the system architecture for the library, which is expected to be operational by 1999.

The Institute's digital collection of peace agreements also will be available online by 1999 as a resource for practitioners, scholars, and students involved in peace processes. "Recurrent themes in these documents make the collection particularly useful as reference materials," Studemeister says. "For those drafting such agreements, there is no point reinventing the wheel each time. Having a 'draft model' to start with should make the task easier. Also, such a collection would be extremely useful to anyone studying contemporary international conflicts."

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