With this volume of the AfSol Journal, we have brought together research findings that provide invaluable insights from academia with the objective of contributing to knowledge generation on emerging challenges in conflict prevention, peace building and sustainable development in Africa. In the first paper, Dr. Prize F.Y. McApreko analyses the strained relationship between the African Union (AU) Member States and the International Criminal Court (ICC). The author underlines the perceived unbalanced propensity of the ICC to try cases that mostly involve African leaders and individual putting into question the relevance of the ICC to the 21st century Africa and beyond. In The evolving nature of foreign intervention in the Al-Shabab insurgency, Jacqueline Nakaiza points out the insufficient scrutiny of foreign interventions in combating Al-Shabab in Somalia. The paper subsequently delved into the impact of foreign interventions in the protracted Somali conflict following systematic review methods. Olawale Akinrinde and Professor Usman Tar unbundle the question surrounding the political economy of the dialectics of xenophobia in South Africa. Their analysis reveals that internal discontentment and contradictions in South Africa such as social and economic inequalities, corruption, leadership deficit, poverty, unemployment, illiteracy and political rhetoric that always pit indigenous economically and materially less privileged South Africans against foreign Africans that are in South Africa to eke a living and carry out their legitimate economic businesses underpin the political economy of the xenophobic violence in South Africa. In Media and peacebuilding in Zamfara state: A study of an armed bandit conflict, Idris Mohammed examines the ways radio contributed to peacebuilding and promotion using the case of armed banditry and cattle rustling in Zamfara State. In the fifth paper that establishes a nexus between Boko Haram insurgency and human insecurity in the north-east of Nigeria, Dr. Anene Chidi Pensive anchors his analysis on human security using a qualitative research framework. He argues that though human insecurity is a major driver of Boko Haram insurgency, the lethal and destructive activities of its actors have heightened and widened the spate of human insecurity amid debilitating food insecurity, physical harm, internal displacements and haemorrhaging refugee syndrome. Seun Bamidele and Taiwo Oladeji Adefisoye question the ability of the current security architecture of the Nigerian Civilian Joint Task Force (CJTF) to cope with the level of sophistication of the Boko Haram insurgency groups across the West African region. In the last paper, Frederick Ifeanyi Obananya employs a qualitative research method to evaluate Nigerian civil war post-conflict peacebuilding. The paper highlights that the reason for the unsuccessful implementation of the policy of reintegrating the victims of the Nigerian civil war is the underlying factor for the consequent agitations for separation and protests in the country.
