Community-Based Early Warning Mechanisms to Address Machete Violence in the Artisanal Mining Areas in Zimbabwe

This chapter steers the debate towards the adoption of community early warningEarly warning mechanisms in the efforts to counter the recurring threatThreats of machete violenceMachete violence in the artisanalArtisanal gold miningMining areas in ZimbabweZimbabwe. The community early warning approach has hitherto received less attention and in some instances been overshadowed by the curative approaches desired by the securitySecurity services. Despite the systemic and political challenges associated with communityCommunity preventive initiatives, the article argues that local and people-centred approaches present the potential to revolutionise machete violence preventionViolence prevention. Local peacebuilidng actors – police, civil society, local leadership, youth and women – are spurred to develop the early warning systemsEarly Warning System within the affected communities by mounting tools to detect threatsThreats, reduce the impact and mitigate the consequences of the violenceViolence. This entails developing preventive systems that are able to assess, monitor, communicate and respond to the machete violenceMachete violence risk in a timely and coordinated manner. The import of the contribution lies not in seeking to prescribe a rigid way in which the community early warningEarly warning mechanisms must work but to highlight an existential need by bringing to the fore a frameworkFramework that can guide the next step of bringing affected communities and pracademics (practitioners and academics) to design and operationalise violence preventionViolence prevention in the artisanal gold mining areas in ZimbabweZimbabwe.