Managing Ethnic Conflicts: A Critical Analysis of the Orthodox Solutions and the Specificity of the African Situation

Abstract

Africa’s ethnic conflicts and crises have embedded in them catastrophic consequences and effects, especially with particular regard to the loss of lives and properties and the disruptions of governmental and political arrangements. The discourse in which the conflicts are embedded is further enveloped in all kinds of proposals such as outright dismemberment of some of the existing political and administrative units, the implementation of political reforms, and fundamental restructuring of the entire social settings in favour of accommodation of the minorities in particular. Against the backdrop that these conflicts and crises require management as a way of averting the aforementioned consequences, the article seeks to undertake a critical evaluation of the existing ethnic management models, theories and solutions in extant literature within the context of the prevailing African circumstances and conditions. Its central goal is to determine the extent to which these solutions and the contained technicalities in which they are expressed can indeed provide the much-needed frameworks for permanent political stabilities in the continent. The qualitative methodology seeks to question the existing assumptions in which these ethnic solutions are defined and their theoretical properties further amplified. With the additional use of critical analytical tools, the article finally seeks the re-formulations and refinements of the ethnic solutions as being referred to in extant literature. The findings revolve around the inappropriateness and lack of applicability of some of the embedded concepts and solutions to the perennial crises as a result of the lack of focus on the uniqueness in which the crises remain defined. The conclusion is hence that the solutions to the crises in the continent should not be wholly generalistic but rather situated within the local peculiarities of the divergent political systems of Africa.