Constructing war in West Africa (and beyond) (original) (raw)
Related papers
2004
Introduction Inter-related civil wars in Liberia (from1989), Sierra Leone (from1991) and Cote d’Ivoire (from 2002) have attracted various explanations. One briefly influential theory suggested “new war”was a post-Cold War upsurge of African barbarism (Kaplan 1994). Other accounts have stressed economic motivations (Berdal & Malone 2001; Collier 2000). Every war needs resources, but whether economics is a sufficient cause of war is controversial. There seems little evidence the West African wars were started by economic competition alone, and the “greed, not grievance” hypothesis has lost some of its shine. Cultural determinism, by contrast, continues to attract adherents (Huntington 2000). One account of the war in Liberia (Ellis 1999) links the violence to “privatization” of ideas about human sacrifice associated with Poro (the male initiation association). Those who consider culture effect, not cause, will be anxious to examine other approaches (Kuper 1999). This paper outlines an...
Towards an African Theory of Just War
Revista de Estudios Africanos, 2020
From 1957 when the first independent country emerged in Africa till date, Africa has fought over a hundred wars1. These wars which have been both inter-state and intra-state wars, sometimes called civil wars, provoke philosophical questions on the meaning and notion of war in African thought scheme. Were these wars just or not within an African conception of war- that is the means, manner and method of fighting war within the African experience? If the idea of just war were advanced through the African worldview, what principles would define it? What alternative and fresh values would be suggested by the theory? This article sets out to address these questions. To do this, the work will attempt to articulate an African theory of just war by mapping out what it would look like if it were informed by the norms, values, and micro-principles that characteristically drive philosophical enquiry in an indigenous African context. The work will draw from narratives about wars that have been ...
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.
War and democracy: the legacy of conflict in East Africa
The Journal of Modern African Studies
The historical literature on statebuilding in Europe has often portrayed a positive relationship between war, state making and long-term democratisation. Similarly, a number of large-n quantitative studies have concluded that war promotes democracy – even in cases of civil war. Against this, a growing area studies literature has argued that violent conflict in developing countries is unlikely to drive either statebuilding or democratisation. However, this literature has rarely sought to systematically set out the mechanisms through which war undermines democracy. Contrasting three ‘high conflict’ cases (Burundi, Rwanda and Uganda) with two ‘low conflict’ cases (Kenya and Tanzania) in East Africa, we trace the way in which domestic conflict has undermined three key elements of the democratisation process: the quality of political institutions, the degree of elite cohesion, and the nature of civil-military relations. Taken together, we suggest that the combined effect of these three m...
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.
African Communities in Crisis: Perspectives of War and its Aftermath
The dual purposes of this course are to illuminate the frequently overlooked community perspectives of African wars – the views, essentially, from below – and assess the implications of these perspectives on policy and practice. The course will draw on a variety of sources, all of which aim to reveal aspects of how warfare and communities in Africa intersect, and how national and international actors might enhance their work. Through this process of inquiry and analysis, students will be encouraged to re-assess biases, assumptions and predispositions about the practice and impact of war, and contemplate whether new understandings can or should effect collective action.
Journal of Central and Eastern European African Studies, 2022
Before the 1990s, the practice of post-conflict management mainly focused on military and law-enforcement priorities. Since then, a development-oriented approach has evolved by making a greater sense of the better addressing of the root causes and characteristics of conflicts, as well as the needs and motivations of actors and individuals. In the same vein, critical approaches to the traditionally „minimalist” approach suggested a relatively new, community-based practice that may help to better understand the complex political, psychological and economic situation in local terms to enhance the efficiency of reintegration of former combatants and make them socially and politically represented after conflicts end.At the same time, according to Mary Kaldor’s theory, we have witnessed meaningful qualitative changes regarding the nature of armed conflicts which pose vital challenges to the Westphalian international system as they reshape the concept of sovereignty and question the state monopoly on violence. Proponents of the “new war” thesis argue that such qualitative changes in wars also necessitate a fundamental shift from the traditional peacebuilding approaches. In Kaldor’s view, as a consequence of the rapid globalisation during the 1990s and the never-ending erosion of state sovereignty a fundamentally new theoretical framework is needed in the course of peace operations which is entirely different from the former so-called „liberal peace”. Thus, the new characteristics of wars pointed out by Kaldor may have a great significance in how peacebuilding and DDR programmes should be planned and implemented in post-conflict settlements.In this analysis the question is how the failure of traditional disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration (DDR) programmes and the prospective new generation of them reflect to „new wars” theories, particularly to Kaldor’s thesis, so what connections they may have, if any. The author makes this search through a Liberian case study. The focal points of the analysis include: actors (1); motivations and goals (2); brutality and the victimisation of the civilians (3); and economic and financial characteristics (4).
Contracting War in West Africa: Cohesion and the business of war in Charles Taylor's Liberia
In the existing literature, compensation is often understood to be an inferior source of cohesion in military organisations. At the same time, African conflicts have particularly been described as being driven by material factors. Through an investigation of the militia forces which fought for Charles Taylor’s government of Liberia, this paper seeks to nuance these views. More specifically, it makes three claims. Firstly, the organisation of these forces was looser than is often claimed in previous literature, which assumes tight and often coercive military patrimonialism. Consequently, the militias did not enjoy the interpersonal bonds of solidarity that have dominated cohesion literature since the Second World War. Secondly, since Taylor chose to suppress attempts to build cohesion around ethnicity, it played a subordinate role in unifying the militias. Thirdly, Taylor instead relied on compensation, which allowed for the broad mobilisation of forces. The combination of militias’ hopes of inclusion into the state patrimony and insufficient resources to realise this left the cohesion of the militias fragile. Ultimately, this paper questions both whether Taylor had any choice but to resort to compensation in a context with a weak state and fragmented social organisation, but also whether the strategy is as inefficient as often thought.