Transnational Armed Politics in Africa (original) (raw)
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Transnational conflict in Africa
2019
2. The key research finding is that most armed conflicts in Africa have a significant transnational element. This inverts the standard trope that the vast majority of African conflicts are internal and not inter-state. Country specialists focusing on individual conflicts have made this observation for years: what is new is that the Transnational Conflict in Africa (TCA) dataset shows for the first time that this is a general phenomenon. This allows for a comparative analysis of the extent, patterns and drivers of transnational conflict, which allows us to move beyond imprecise metaphors such as conflict ‘spillover’, into a more systematic representation of the phenomenon, that puts transnational political rivalries at the centre of the story of conflict in the continent.
Journal of Law and Criminal Justice, 2018
Non-international armed conflict is one between the government and rebel group(s) within the borders of a state or between rebel group(s) among themselves. This has clear legal regimes applicable and assessment is also simple. However, various armed conflicts fought across Africa today have changed both in dimension and characteristics. Foreign state actors and non-state actor have occupied the space in battlefield fighting for one faction or the other. This has convoluted the notion of international and non-international armed conflict and confused the legal dichotomy inherent in them. The greatest culprit of this is Sub-Saharan African counties with the highest theater of war. This article considers the argument on internationalization of armed conflict generally and within the precinct of the armed conflicts in three Sub-Sahara African countries of DRC, Somalia and Nigeria. The paper finally recommends the removal of the dichotomy between international armed conflict and non-international armed conflict in order to operate a single legal regime that will regulate all types of armed conflict. It argues further that this will engender a seamless assessment and prosecution of violations of laws of armed conflict especially in Africa.
Understanding contemporary conflicts in Africa: a state of affairs and current knowledge
Defense & Security Analysis, 2014
Understanding contemporary conflicts in Africa remains directly dependent on the approaches employed to decipher or interpret them. This article first examines the bias of conventional approaches (inherited from the Cold War) and then those of a series of supposedly “newer” approaches. Relying primarily on West African examples, it offers a brief overview of current knowledge, issues, and avenues for research, based on three apparent characteristics of a “new generation” of conflicts: the regionalization of wars, the privatization of violence and security, and the recourse to extreme forms of brutality. These three major trends bear witness to a rapid transformation of war and armed violence over the past 20 years, but they are not sufficient to establish a radical historical break between “old” and “new” conflicts in Africa. By concealing elements of continuity a priori, the most influential “new” approaches actually make it impossible to ponder their own limits. To that end, fashionability and struggles for influence within the Africanist field play a major role in perpetuating dominant, sensationalistic, or simplistic (and invariably incorrect) portrayals of African conflicts.
Introducing the transnational conflict in Africa dataset
2019
This occasional paper is the counterpart to the paper, ‘Redescribing Transnational Conflict in Africa’ (Twagiramungu et al. 2019). It introduces the transnational conflict in Africa (TCA) dataset, which can be used to study the neglected transnational dimensions of armed conflicts in Africa. The TCA dataset is built by combining, augmenting, and revising several existing datasets, each of which captures some elements of transnational conflict, including interstate wars, external state support in interstate wars, low-intensity confrontations between states, external interventions in civil wars, and external support to rebels or coup-makers. The methodology underlying the TCA is explained and some descriptive statistics concerning the dimensions of transnational conflict in Africa are presented. The final section discusses some challenges and concludes that the conventional wisdom that Africa has experienced little interstate conflict is misleading. In order to fully explain the inter...
Violent Internal Conflict and the African State: Towards a Framework of Analysis
Journal of Contemporary African Studies, 2002
Africa is in a deep and persistent malaise. It is by far the least developed continent economically, and the most conflict-prone politically. In policy-making circles and media characterisations, it is "the hopeless continent" (The Economist May 13-19, 2000). Such pessimism is driven in part by the failure to manage-much less resolve-the destructive consequences of multiple violent conflicts. The ineffectiveness of conflict management efforts by the United Nations, the OAU, sub-regional organisations, or eminent personalities like Nelson Mandela or Jimmy Carter, is itself due in large part to the lack of a conceptual framework for analysing internal turmoil. Without an appropriate diagnosis of the causes of conflict, remedial action becomes a futile, if not dangerous exercise. This article seeks to articulate in preliminary form a framework for understanding and diagnosing the causes of Africa"s multiple internal conflicts. It suggests that these are rooted in the everyday politics and discourses of weak states, rather than in outbreaks of ancient hatreds, the pathology of particular rulers, or the breakdown of normally peaceful domestic systems; and argues that the direction of effective conflict resolution lies in reconfiguring local politics and reconstructing the malformed African state rather than in the "saving failed states" approaches of recent years.
Continuity and Change in War and Conflict in Africa
2017
Since the end of the Cold War, Africa has experienced a disproportionately large number of armed conflicts. Between the early 1990s and the late 2000s, Africa underwent a period of significant progress in reducing the number and intensity of armed conflicts. Since 2010, however, the continent has witnessed some disturbing upward conflict trends. This article focuses on the major patterns in armed conflict in Africa since 2010.
(2019) Africa's Transregional Conflicts
Comparativ, 2018
Transregional conflicts – this collection of articles introduces this new analytical category for the study of a specific group of violent conflicts in Africa while providing perspectives on possible resolutions. Ontologically, this proposed category is distinct from broader, more fuzzy terms such as “international”, “transnational”, or “global”. And epistemologically it implies a different understanding of the way in which transregional conflicts such as, for instance, the ones around the Lake Chad Basin, the Great Lakes region, or the Horn of Africa can be studied. Accordingly, this category of transregional conflicts: leaves the silos of the traditional organization of knowledge, with its division between different areas as studied through area studies (as opposed to the so-called systematic disciplines), and rather engages in cross- and transdisciplinary exercises to unpack the way how “regions” are socially constructed.
State Formation and Conflict in Africa
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics, 2019
Dominant narratives and theories developed at the turn of the 21st century to account for the links between state formation and civil wars in Africa converged around two main ideas. First was the contention that the increase in civil wars across the continent—like that in many parts of the globe, including South Asia and Central Europe—was linked to state failure or decay. Violent conflict thus came to be seen as the expression of the weakness, disintegration, and collapse of political institutions in the postcolonial world. Second, guerrilla movements, once viewed as the ideological armed wings of Cold War contenders, then came to be seen as roving bandits interested in plundering the spoils left by decaying states, and their motives as primarily, if not only, economic or personal, rather than political. However, recent research has challenged the reductionism that underlay such accounts by looking into the day-to-day politics of civil war, thus moving beyond the search for the motives that bring rebels and rebel movements to wage war against the established order. Drawing on this literature, this article argues that violent conflict is part and parcel of historical processes of state formation. Thus, in order to understand how stable political institutions can be built in the aftermath of civil war, it is essential to study the institutions that regulate political life during conflict. This implies a need not only to look at how (and if) state institutions survive once war has broken out, but also to take into account the institutions put in place in areas beyond the control of the state.
Since the independence processes in the African continent, armed conflicts, peace and security have raised concern and attention both at the domestic level and at the international scale. In recent years, all aspects have undergone significant changes which have given rise to intense debate. The end of some historical conflicts has taken place in a context of slight decrease in the number of armed conflicts and the consolidation of post-conflict reconstruction processes. Moreover, African regional organizations have staged an increasingly more active internal shift in matters related to peace and security, encouraged by the idea of promoting “African solutions to African problems”. This new scenario, has been accompanied by new uncertainties at the security level and major challenges at the operational level, especially for the African Union. This article aims to ascertain the state of affairs on all these issues and raise some key questions to consider.