Neither Bandits nor Madmen: Modern African Insurgents

Abstract

African Guerrillas: Raging against the Machine. Edited by Morten Boas, Kevin C. Dunn Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2007. 275 pp., $58.00 cloth (ISBN: 1-58826-495-4), $23.50 paper (ISBN: 1-58826-471-8). One of the notable characteristics of the African political landscape at the beginning of the twenty-first century is the persistence of political violence perpetrated by armed insurgencies. Because guerrilla movements have such a far reaching impact, not only on politics and the peace and security of the continent but also on the pace of economic development and social stability, it is critical for scholars and practitioners alike to accurately understand the motives, sources, and nature of African guerrilla movements. In their provocative edited volume, African Guerrillas: Raging against the Machine , Morten Boas and Kevin Dunn provide a reconceptualization of guerrilla movements. Specifically, they and their contributors challenge the facile assumption that African movements can be understood in terms of “single-factor” explanations that regard contemporary insurgents as “devoid of any kind of political agenda” or “greed-based approaches [that] present them as bandits” (p. 1). As the contributors show, not only are these explanations empirically suspect, they also leave policymakers with few options for dealing with guerilla movements—short of brute force. Politically motivated insurgents can be negotiated with; bandits cannot. At its core, African Guerrillas mounts a fundamental critique of the “insular, positivist-dominated field of US political science” (p. 4). Boas and Dunn advocate a “holistic, historically grounded approach” to understanding the complexities of African guerrilla movements, which “are best understood as rational responses to the composition of African states and their polities” (p. 4). Current guerrilla movements, they write, “seem more like manifestations of rage against the ‘machinery’ of dysfunctional states, their equally fragmented and corrupted institutions and the uneven impact of a globalized modernity” (p. 5). Importantly, the contributors to African Guerrillas employ this contextually grounded approach throughout the volume. After framing the …