Whose Knowledge? Whose Power?

Global South countries do not have equal access to financial resources, institutional capacity, political influence, or knowledge production. SCC can therefore reproduce some of the hierarchies it seeks to challenge. The real promise of SSC lies not in sharing solutions, but in sharing the power to define problems, produce knowledge, and shape responses.

This distinction matters, particularly in Africa’s peace and security landscape. Africa has accumulated decades of experience in conflict prevention, peacekeeping, mediation, peacebuilding, and community resilience. Yet African knowledge is too often treated as something to be extracted, documented, and transferred, rather than recognized as expertise. This applies even within SSC frameworks.

One example of an African-led peace and security innovation is FemWise-Africa, the Network of African Women in Conflict Prevention and Mediation. Established by the African Union in 2017 as part of the African Peace and Security Architecture (APSA), FemWise-Africa emerged in a field historically dominated by men and often shaped by conflict-resolution theories developed outside Africa. Part of the rationale for APSA was to strengthen SSC on peace and security while recognizing internal hierarchies. By identifying, training, and deploying female African mediators, the network ensures that mediation strategies are grounded in local realities, linguistic contexts, cultural norms, and lived experiences. It also demonstrates institutional hybridity by bridging formal diplomacy and grassroots peacebuilding. FemWise-Africa thus positions Africa not only as a recipient of peacebuilding knowledge, but as an innovator and exporter of institutional approaches that can challenge conventional global models.

In 2024, the AU Panel of the Wise adopted a decentralized framework for FemWise-Africa, enabling regional and national chapters. The decentralization sought to address concerns that continental-level mediation networks risked becoming detached from grassroots women’s organizations. This is where SSC can be transformative. Rather than treating cooperation as a process in which one partner offers a solution, and another receives it, it should be understood as a knowledge co-production process. The objective should not always be to identify a best practice and replicate it elsewhere. Instead, the aim should be to create spaces in which diverse experiences, expertise, and locally grounded knowledge can shape new solutions.

In peace and security, national governments, security institutions, and international organizations facilitate policy design. But they are not the only producers of knowledge about (in)security. Communities that live with conflict, women’s organizations, youth networks, local peacebuilders, and civil society actors also possess valuable knowledge gained through direct experience. Their perspectives often reveal aspects of (in)security that institutional assessments and policy documents often miss.

The limits of institutional mediation models become clear in contexts such as the Boko Haram insurgency in north-eastern Nigeria, where women at the grassroots level identified threats long before formal institutions did[1]. People experience conflict differently depending on their access to resources, power, social expectations, and gender roles. At the height of the Boko Haram insurgency, women were often viewed primarily as victims, while men were perceived as perpetrators. As insurgents increasingly deployed women and girls as suicide bombers, security institutions struggled to respond to a threat that challenged prevailing assumptions[2]. Yet many local female peacebuilders had already seen warning signs through engagement with survivors, returnees, and affected communities. Their initial exclusion from formal decision-making processes illustrated the costs of treating local knowledge as supplementary rather than essential. It also demonstrated why women’s leadership matters as a source of insight that can improve responses to complex security challenges, not only as a question of representation.

Women are often included in development and peacebuilding initiatives as beneficiaries or participants, but far less consistently as producers of knowledge or as decision-makers. This distinction is critical. Inviting women to consultations is not the same as giving them influence over which problems to prioritize, which evidence is deemed credible, how resources are allocated, or which solutions are adopted. These dynamics reveal a persistent gap between institutional conceptions of expertise and the lived knowledge of communities most affected by insecurity.

If SSC is to fulfil its transformative potential, three shifts are required.

First, a move is needed from knowledge transfer to knowledge co-production. Cooperation should begin with the recognition that each partner brings knowledge, experience, and institutional strengths, not with the assumption that one partner has expertise and another needs to acquire it. This means designing research, training, and policy initiatives collaboratively, and permitting local people to shape the questions asked. It also requires recognition that women's organizations and female peacebuilders often generate critical insights that are too often dismissed as anecdotal, rather than valued as evidence.

Second, there should be a shift from short-term exchanges to sustained institutional partnerships. Study visits, workshops, and technical exchanges can be valuable, but are insufficient by themselves. Meaningful cooperation requires institutional relationships that enable knowledge to circulate over time, build trust, and generate locally appropriate innovations.

A clear example is the work of peace and security training institutions across Africa, including the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Centre, the International Peace Support Training Centre, and the Southern African Development Community’s Regional Peacekeeping Training Centre. These institutions conduct research and need-assessments to inform training programs, co-design courses with member states, and create platforms for exchange and collaboration. Such partnerships strengthen regional ownership and enable institutions to learn from one another while continuously adapting to changing realities. Sustained cooperation should also strengthen women-led peace and mediation networks, embedding them within peace and security architectures rather than treating them as temporary projects.

Third, progression is needed from inclusion to influence. The language of inclusion is commonplace in development and peacebuilding. Yet presence does not necessarily equate to power. Women, young people, civil society actors, and community leaders should not simply be invited into spaces where decisions have already been made. They should have meaningful influence over the design, financing, implementation, and evaluation of cooperation initiatives.

As the international community marks United Nations Day for South-South Cooperation on September 12, the focus should not be solely on the volume of expertise flowing between countries of the Global South. The more important questions are whose expertise is recognized, whose knowledge informs policy, and who has the power to shape development and peacebuilding strategies. This is not to claim that all South-South partnerships are equitable. They are not. South-South cooperation must also confront imbalances in political power, resources, institutional capacity, and representation. The future of SSC depends on addressing these internal power dynamics and ensuring that local and gendered expertise shapes policy. For Africa, that means recognizing local expertise, valuing lived experience, and ensuring that women participate fully in shaping cooperation initiatives.

[1] Akinyoade, Demola, and Tosin Adebayo (2021). “Grassroots Women’s Response to Boko Haram Insurgency.” Peace Research, 53(1): 76–100. https://www.jstor.org/stable/27185232

[2] Campbell, John (2020). “Women, Boko Haram, and Suicide Bombings.” Council on Foreign Relations, 25 March. https://www.cfr.org/articles/women-boko-haram-and-suicide-bombings