Building Peace among Monitors? The Monitoring and Implementation of Zimbabwe’s Global Political Agreement

Signatories, guarantors and stakeholders of peace treaties and global political agreements (GPA) need reliable information on the agreement’s implementation to track progress, ensure compliance and prevent renewed conflict. Implementation monitoring mechanisms (IMMs) are, therefore, an important component of peace and transitional governance processes. Whereas monitoring can be entrusted to an independent third party, the signatories of Zimbabwe’s GPA set up a Joint Monitoring and Implementation Committee (JOMIC). This article outlines the implementation of the GPA and discusses the hybrid design and workings of JOMIC, which sought to build peace among monitors from power-sharing parties, who jointly observed the agreement’s implementation. It argues that JOMIC was not a viable substitution for an independent IMM despite having some merit in observing political violence and gathering information for the power-sharing parties. JOMIC’s basic concept of permitting political elites to monitor their own compliance with the agreement was impractical, its proceedings non-transparent and its outputs of little use to guarantors and stakeholders. The absence of an official independent IMM, for which civil society monitors could not fully compensate, impeded the transitional governance process and its facilitation by the Southern African Development Community (SADC), which was meant to guarantee that the GPA was implemented. Zimbabwe’s GPA offers cautionary lessons for the design of implementation mechanisms that serve multiple purposes, which can compromise the quality of monitoring. It points to the need to institutionalise implementation monitoring in the African peace and security architecture to improve the ability of the African Union and regional economic communities to guarantee that agreements that they facilitate are implemented.