Ethnic Violence in Africa: Destructive Legacies of Pre-Colonial States

Domestic Violence and the Law in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa reveals the ways in which domestic space and domestic relationships take on different meanings in African contexts that extend the boundaries of family obligation, kinship, and dependency. The term domestic violence encompasses kin-based violence, marriage-based violence, gender-based violence, as well as violence between patrons and clients who shared the same domestic space. As a lived experience and as a social and historical unit of analysis, domestic violence in colonial and postcolonial Africa is complex. Using evidence drawn from Subsaharan Africa, the chapters explore the range of domestic violence in Africa’s colonial past and its present, including taxation and the insertion of the household into the broader structure of colonial domination. African histories of domestic violence demand that scholars and activists refine the terms and analyses and pay attention to the historical legacies of contemporary problems. This collection brings into conversation historical, anthropological, legal, and activist perspectives on domestic violence in Africa and fosters a deeper understanding of the problem of domestic violence, the limits of international human rights conventions, and local and regional efforts to address the issue.

Racial and ethnic violence takes many forms. Genocides, ethnic cleansing, pogroms, civil wars, and violent separatist movements are the most obvious and extreme expressions, but less organized violence such as rioting, and hate crimes by individuals or small groups are products of racial and ethnic conflict as well. Also, the distribution of criminal violence within societies, which may or may not be aimed at members of another group, is in some places a by-product of ongoing conflicts between superior and subordinated racial or ethnic groups. Although estimates of the number of deaths attributable to ethnic violence vary widely, range of eleven to twenty million given for the period between 1945 and the early 1990s show the gravity of this type of conflict (Williams 1994, 50). So it comes as no surprise that scholars have paid increasing attention to such conflicts over the last decades.

This chapter examines the link between modernity and ethnic violence by focusing on Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Modernity interacts with and depends on the local social environment, and the social environments present at the onset of modernity varied by region. Two of modernity's most influential social carriers were colonialism and missionaries, whose biases and ulterior motives often promoted forms of modernity that fostered environments conducive to ethnic violence. The chapter first considers how colonialism promotes ethnic violence, with emphasis on how different combinations of insulation, competition, and stratification made possible “a remarkably stable system of [colonial] rule.” This is followed by a discussion of how missionaries contributed to ethnic violence by promoting ethnic consciousness, using Burma, Assam, and Vietnam as examples. The chapter concludes with an analysis of ethnic violence in the Americas.

Freedom is not free: Examining health equity for racial and ethnic minoritized veterans.

Mary Douglas (1993) has indicated some of the shared concerns that keep voluntary enclaves together as ‘social movements’. The present paper describes a rather different kind of enclave politics, being concerned with the ‘new violence’ of groups enclaved by social exclusion and force. The paper focuses on the emergence and subsequent development of dissidents in the civil war in Sierra Leone. The RUF was at the outset a tiny but conventional guerrilla force, modelled on one of the militias in the Liberian civil war, and seeking to overthrow a decayed neo-patrimonial ‘one-party’ regime. Gaining little popular support, its members became marooned in forested isolation on the Liberia-Sierra Leone border. Recruits were mainly school children seized by force and ‘converted’ through having to take part in atrocities against rural civilians. Unable to return to the larger society on pain of summary execution, captives have had little option but to adjust to the political fantasies of a violent and unstable leadership. They were enclaved by force. Indicating the predictive strength of Douglas' arguments about the cultural dynamics of the enclave, the subsequent atrocity-drenched story of the RUF suggests that it is not the content of belief that determines institutional culture but vice versa. To survive, the enforced enclave develops the concerns of the classic ‘sect’ - a doctrinaire ‘rationality’ (expressed in crude acts of ‘subtractive’ violence), rejection of magic, decision making by lots, preoccupation with defection, otiose leadership style. If the rest of the world is to come to terms with violent enclave organizations such as the RUF and Algerian GIA it may have to pay more careful attention to the way enclave institutions think. They may not respond ‘rationally’ to the kinds of incentives offered by mainstream groups organised around hierarchical and/or individualist systems of social accountability.

Racial and ethnic violence takes many forms. Genocides, ethnic cleansing, pogroms, civil wars, and violent separatist movements are the most obvious and extreme expressions, but less organized violence such as rioting, and hate crimes by individuals or small groups are products of racial and ethnic conflict as well. Also, the distribution of criminal violence within societies, which may or may not be aimed at members of another group, is in some places a by-product of ongoing conflicts between superior and subordinated racial or ethnic groups. Although estimates of the number of deaths attributable to ethnic violence vary widely, range of eleven to twenty million given for the period between 1945 and the early 1990s show the gravity of this type of conflict (Williams 1994, 50). So it comes as no surprise that scholars have paid increasing attention to such conflicts over the last decades.

Elections remain the basic fundamental to any democracy; they are also the political activities most open to manipulation leading to violence in Africa. Whilst in some advanced countries, elections are seen as an instrument for peace, elections in Sub-Sahara Africa are often fraught with conflict and political violence. The role of electoral administrators is very critical in ensuring the achievement of better democracy through elections. Studies indicate that electoral administration is given little consideration in the investigation of political democratisation, especially in transitional democracies. This paper seeks to test whether electoral administration contributes or reduces conflict in Africa through a comparative study between Ghana and Kenya. The study adopted descriptive correlational survey to find out the extent of association between electoral governance and conflicts in Africa. The study stipulated two research objectives and hypotheses. These hypotheses were tested to ascertain their impact on the rate of electoral violence. The results from the study indicated that all two stated hypotheses were supported by the data. The findings show a critical association between the role of election management bodies, electoral system and the rate of violence. The study also discovered high effectiveness of electoral governance in Ghana compared to Kenya. Keywords: electoral administration, electoral conflict, political violence, ethnicity, democratic process. DOI : 10.7176/JAAS/58-06 Publication date :September 30 th 2019

The present paper investigates how ethnic violence and civil war in Sri Lanka have affected local property rights institutions . I use local case studies to analyze the institutional relations and alliances between civilians and combatants in the emergent society of violence that shapes local communities in civil war. My focus will be on how civilians from different ethnic groups utilize social and political capital assets to secure entitlements to natural resources. The findings of my research suggest that resource entitlements in Trincomalee are ethnicised in the sense that opportunities and access to resources are unequally distributed among the three ethnic groups (Sinhalese, Tamils, Muslims), because these groups are unequally endowed with political capital. Patron-client networks based on ethnicity shape the relative bargaining power of local actors. This system reproduces perceived grievances among the different ethnic groups and thus reproduces the conditions for ethnic violence.

Do economic shocks cause civil conflict? Evidence at the country level is ambiguous. We study the impact of plausibly exogenous shocks to world food prices on civil conflict in Africa using panel data at the level of a 0.5 degree grid cell. We find that higher prices lead to fewer civil conflict battles in cells that produce food, and more civil conflict battles in cells that consume food. We interpret this as evidence that negative income shocks cause civil conflict, as rising prices increase income for producers and decrease income for consumers in real terms. The result is consistent with a model that allows for a distinction between two varieties of conflict. In food-producing cells, higher prices reduce civil conflict battles over the control of territory (what we call factor conflict) and increase smaller-scale conflict over the appropriation of surplus (output conflict). This difference arises because higher prices raise the opportunity cost of soldiering for producers, while also inducing net consumers to appropriate increasingly valuable surplus as their real wages fall. In food-consuming cells, higher prices increase both forms of conflict, as poor consumers turn to soldiering and appropriation in order to maintain a minimum consumption target. We corroborate the model's predictions on output conflict using both cell-level data on violence and looting and geocoded survey data on theft and physical assault. Ignoring distinctions between consumer and producer effects leads to attenuated estimates. Projected price changes from 2010-2050 are expected to substantially increase both forms of conflict.

Analysts of civil war settlements have devoted significant attention to how the security of warring parties can be enhanced to reduce their mutual vulnerabilities and foster peace. Less work has been done, however, on another serious challenge of postwar settings: the security of the general population. Once safe from the crossfire of warring armies, civilians often face new threats from violent criminals, excombatants, rioters, vigilantes, or members of other ethnic groups with whom they are to cohabit under a peace agreement. In the aftermath of virtually all the civil wars of the 1980s and 1990s, civilians perceived greater insecurity, often as a result of documented increases in violent crime. Ironically, in places like El Salvador and South Africa, civilians faced greater risk of violent death or serious injury after the end of the conflict than during it. [1] Even in cases where the end of civil wars has incontrovertibly reduced the dangers to civilians, postwar crime waves have been common, as have civil disturbances of various kinds. postwar public security situation is not entirely bleak: some aspects of peace settlements foster perceived and real improvements for the security of the general population. These include enhanced human rights protections, punishment for past human rights violations, and provisions to disarm combatants and civilians after wars. As compared to these various measures, reform of security institutions may have somewhat less impact on societies like Rwanda, where large portions of the populace are implicated in ethnic hatred and violence. Nevertheless, security reforms remain one of the most important mechanisms for preventing political violence and common crime in many postwar settings. As police scholar David Bayley puts it, The police are to government as the edge is to the knife. [2] Where police are repressive or politically biased, formal democratic rules and equality before the law can mean little in practice. Where the police are dominated by one ethnic group, members of excluded groups will likely turn to alternative, ethnically based mechanisms to provide security. And where no public security provisions are made, organized crime can assume such proportions as to produce corrupt mafia states, possibly with the complicity of international actors. Conversely, police who are effective in protecting individuals from criminal threats, who respect individuals' rights, and who protect vulnerable groups regardless of ethnicity or political orientation can create a positive climate even when broader political arrangements are uncertain or less than democratic. [3] Despite the myriad dangers for public security after conflict, relatively few civil war settlements explicitly set forth a road map for restructuring security forces in ways that reorient public safety toward protecting citizens rather than the regime. Of eighteen recent cases, minimal police reforms were included in twelve agreements (see Table 1). In most of these cases, few specifics were stipulated beyond the inclusion of former enemies into police forces and brief commitments to human rights standards and professionalization. general neglect of public security provisions in peace accords reflects the logic of peacemaking; the parties, and outside mediators, tend to focus on the post-settlement security of the civil war adversaries themselves, since this is what will make or break a peace process in the short run. Indeed, inattention to public security issues has seldom, if ever, caused renewed civil war. It has, however, contributed to extreme hardships and undermined longer-term prospects for both peace and democracy. Most civil war peace accords in the post-Cold War period have depended to some extent on liberal political institutions, including elections with at least two competing parties, constitutional systems with checks and balances, and minimum political and civic rights. …

The 21st century beginning from 2000 to 2014 portrays Africa’s current situation as beset by conflicts and violence, drawing attention from every part of the world. As in decades earlier, it is no good news! Prominent among these are terrorism with its devastating impact, revolutions, uprisings, turmoil, communal conflicts, coup d’état, hatred and malicious actions towards ethnic groups, institutionalised division, deep rooted enmity between ethnic groups, dangerous religious sects, criminal political groups, corruption and all sorts of deprivation. This paper is however, a broad reflection of the general situation in the continent that we narrowed to Nigeria and its peculiarities. The Marxist theory of the post-colonial state was chosen as the tool for analysis. Further, we adopted quantitative descriptive analysis with secondary literature forming the base of our information source. In addition, we had personal discussions with security agents, though not systemised. Finally, we seek to make a further contribution to the ongoing intellectual efforts by identifying some areas that demand urgent attention. It is hoped that the strategic suggestions that this paper discusses, will provide a theoretical and practical platform for further studies and subsequent solution towards the negative news reports, thereby making news from Africa to be really, “good news”.

Rape and HIV/AIDS in Rwanda

No AccessPolicy Research Working Papers27 Jun 2013What is a Civil War? A Critical Review of its Definition and (Econometric) ConsequencesAuthors/Editors: Mark Gersovitz, Norma KrigerMark Gersovitz, Norma Krigerhttps://doi.org/10.1596/1813-9450-6397SectionsAboutPDF (1.1 MB) ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareFacebookTwitterLinked In Abstract:The authors argue that the academic literature, both qualitative and quantitative, has mislabeled most episodes of large-scale violence in Africa as civil war; these episodes better fit their concept of regional war complexes The paper seeks to highlight the fundamental flaws in the conception of civil war in the econometric literature and their implications for econometric specification and estimation, problems that this literature is inherently incapable of rectifying The authors advocate the comparative study of regional war complexes in Africa based on historical narratives Previous bookNext book FiguresReferencesRecommendedDetailsCited BySyria: From Popular Uprising to Civil War25 August 2021Syria: From Popular Uprising to Civil War27 May 2020Applying Multi-method Design to Post-colonial AfricaAfrica24 January 2017 View Published: April 2013 Copyright & Permissions Related RegionsAfricaRelated TopicsMacroeconomics and Economic GrowthFinance and Financial Sector Development KeywordsCIVIL WARARMED CONFLICTVIOLENCEGUERILLASREGIONAL WARAFRICA Loading ...

This article argues that ethnic problems are only one aspect of political violence in Africa, while violent conflicts must be considered a failure of the state to perform some of its fundamental tasks. State formation in Africa is a transition process starting from an institutional endowment of ethnic division. Ethnic capital in Africa ensures the provision of many of the services that a modern state has taken over in rich countries, e.g. security, education, norms of behaviour. Few African states can deliver all these services adequately, and must go through an initial phase of federation of ethnic groups before they can provide a credible substitute for ethnic capital. The system of redistribution within and among groups is the key to creating the solidarity links between them, and its breakdown is liable to trigger political violence. A formal game-theoretic model is presented which brings out the impact of redistribution on rebellious activity, as well as the crucial role of the ability of the government to commit credibly to its expenditure policy. Without this, there is no redistribution taking place in equilibrium, and large amounts of resources are invested in warring. Civil wars, or other forms of political violence, are thus an integral part of the political economy of Africa.

Postcolonial Africa has struggled in operationalising liberal democracy, marked by recurring incidents of electoral violence leading to significant loss of lives and destruction of property throughout the continent. This has imposed a responsibility on continental and regional actors, such as the African Union (AU) to intervene. Thus, the AU has made significant strides in creating several frameworks that foster peace and security on the continent. For instance, the African Charter on Democracy, Elections and Governance (ACDEG), which was proposed in 2007 and enacted in 2012, has been instrumental in the governance and conduct of African elections. Most countries have adopted electoral democracy, with elections held cyclically every four to five years. Despite these initiatives, African elections are marred with election-related violence (ERV) ranging from protests to civilian deaths.