Cameroon, Nigeria and the Bakassi conflict: building blocks for a Non-Democratic Peace Theory

Abstract

The Democratic Peace Theory, which argues in part that democracies hardly go to war against each other, has made a lasting impression in the field of war and peace studies. While the theory has been mostly applied to the ‘peace zones’ of the Global North (made up of stable democracies and where war is ‘unthinkable’), the ‘conflict zones’ of the Global South (a significant part of which Africa is made of) has been left in relative theoretical neglect, as it relates to peaceful interstate relations. The Nigeria–Cameroon crisis over the oil-rich Bakassi Peninsula provides a sensitive case study in the Global South for laying a foundation for a Non-Democratic Peace Theory (NDPT). Why did the Nigeria–Cameroon conflict over the strategic oil-rich Bakassi Peninsula not degenerate into a sustained full-scale war given the non-democratic foundations of the participant countries? This paper makes an attempt at laying the building blocks for an NDPT for Africa. Although Cameroon and Nigeria could not at the latent point of the conflict be considered democracies, they acted in a manner that reflected the character of global democracies.