Conflict In Africa Research Articles

1807: Economic shocks, conflict and the slave trade

A large fraction of modern global conflicts has occurred in Africa, resulting in a disproportionate number of fatalities compared to other regions. Many of Africa's conflicts have deep historical roots. In this paper, we contribute to understanding the determinants of historical African conflict by studying an important historical source of conflict: suppression of the slave trade after 1807. We use geo-coded data on African conflicts to uncover a discontinuous increase in conflict after 1807 in areas affected by the slave trade, indicating that suppression increased the incidence of conflict between Africans. In West Africa, the slave trade declined. This empowered interests that rivaled existing authorities, and political leaders resorted to violence in order to maintain their influence. In West-Central and South-East Africa, slave exports increased after 1807 and were produced through violence.

INFORMATION-BASED CONFLICT IN AFRICA

For a long time, the African continent was regarded as the ‘Dark Continent’.The rapid assimilation of information technologies into the African economies hasplaced Africa firmly on a trajectory that will see it compete and integrate with thedeveloped world. As nations and organisations become more information-centric, itis natural that conflicts and competition amongst the various nations or organisationswill become increasingly information-based. In this article, the authors reflect uponinformation-based conflict in Africa. Areas of information conflict that are discussedinclude censorship, communications intercepts, the use of information andcommunications to instigate violence and uprisings, and the possibility of cyberwarfare.The article shows that the use of technology to conduct information conflictin Africa is prevalent, and that it is likely to increase.

Accountability for Intervention: Negotiating Civilian Protection Dilemmas with Respect to Economic Community of West African States and African Union Interventions

ABSTRACT African states have been confronted with myriad challenges, especially in the areas of peace and security. As a result of the perceived reluctance or inability of the international community, specifically the United Nations, to intervene in a timely fashion in Africa's conflicts, regional and subregional organizations in Africa have assumed a greater role in conflict prevention, management, resolution, and peacekeeping in Africa. Notably, the Economic Community of West African States and the African Union have intervened in various African conflicts with either retrospective or prior endorsement by the UN Security Council to protect civilians from the adverse effects of conflicts. However, interventions by these African institutions have sometimes had unintended consequences. In this paper we discuss some of the dilemmas and challenges that arise during the use of force as a last resort for civilian protection in Africa. We argue that the use of force as a last resort for humanitarian intervention by African regional and subregional organizations for protecting civilians from mass atrocities often results in positive as well as negative unintended consequences for both interveners and civilians. However, for multiple reasons, such as the lack of political will, loopholes in the judicial systems of troop contributing countries, and resource constraints, interveners are rarely held accountable for their actions that constitute violations against the very civilians whose protection provided the basis and rationale for such interventions in the first place.

AFRICAN UNION, CONFLICT, AND CONFLICT RESOLUTION IN AFRICA: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF THE RECENT KENYA AND ZIMBABWE CONFLICTS

This paper examines African conflicts and the roles of the African Union (AU) in conflict resolution, focusing on the recent Zimbabwe and Kenya conflicts. Two conflict and conflict resolution theories: Hobessian realism and Burton's human needs theory were considered. This paper finds that ethnicity, elections in Africa, colonial manipulation of Africa's boundary, and longstanding land struggle contribute to Africa's conflicts; employing a comparative perspective however, it contends that the primary cause of the Zimbabwe and Kenya conflicts is the failure of the governments of Mugabe and Kibaki to address the basic needs of the people. This paper concludes that unlike other conflict resolution theories/mechanisms, the AU should stress the improvement of the governance institution in order to persuade the governments in Africa to respond to the basic needs of the populations. This is the major stipulation of needs theory, which is compelling for understanding the causes of conflict and conflict resolution in Africa.

Incorporating Africa's Conflicts into the War on Terror

The War on Terror has increasingly become a catchall for U.S. interventionism abroad. Few informed critics of the United States post‐9/11 policy could rebuke the choice to go after Osama bin Laden ...

‘Paper protection’ mechanisms: child soldiers and the international protection of children in Africa's conflict zones

The arrest and prosecution in March 2006 of the former Liberian warlord-President Charles Taylor by the UN-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone, for war crimes including the recruitment and use of child soldiers, and the arrest and prosecution of the Congolese warlord, Thomas Lubanga Dyilo, by the International Criminal Court, accused of enlisting child soldiers in the DRC war, have raised expectations that finally international conventions and customary international laws protecting children in conflict zones will now have enforcement powers. But why has it taken so long to protect children in conflict situations despite the volume of international treaties and conventions? What do we know about the phenomenon of child soldiering, and why are children still routinely recruited and used in Africa's bloody wars? This article argues that against the background of unfolding events relating to prosecution for enlistment of child soldiers, the international community is beginning to wake up to the challenge of enforcing its numerous ‘paper protection’ instruments for the protection of children. However, a range of challenges still pose serious threats to the implementation and enforcement of the international conventions protecting children. Extensive research fieldwork in Liberia and Sierra Leone over three years reveals that the application of the restrictive and Western-centric definition and construction of a ‘child’ and ‘childhood’ raises inherent difficulties in the African context. In addition, most war-torn and post-conflict African societies are faced with the challenge of incorporating international customary laws into their domestic laws. The failure of the international community to enforce its standards on child soldiers also has to do with the politics of ratification of international treaties, in particular the fear by African governments of setting dangerous precedents, since they are also culpable of recruitment and use of child soldiers.

The African Stakes of the Congo War

John F. Clark, ed. The African Stakes of the Congo War. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. xv + 249 pp. Maps. Index. $55.00. Cloth. Long awaited to fill the gap in our knowledge of the ongoing conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and provide a clear examination of the implications of what has been dubbed first continental The African Stakes of the Congo War offers a collection of well-balanced and meticulously wrought essays. The four-part volume goes well beyond the urgent necessity of documenting the havoc wreaked in the Congo since Mobutu's demise. Suggestive and pertinent as these thirteen essays are, however, they obviously cannot pretend to embrace the totality of the Congolese tragedy. Clark's introductory chapter skillfully provides the common threads that run through the book by defining the conflict in terms of several premises: the dominant historical pattern of the scramble for Congo's resources; the collapse and Mobutu's extractive state legacy; the larger trend of warlordism (spurred by Western corporations' greed for Africa's resources) that has swept across the continent since the 1990s; and the political vacuum left by the end of the cold war. In the first part, Crawford Young (chapter 2) provides a useful postcolonial taxonomy of Africa's conflicts that rests on the old-fashioned, yet pertinent, Weberian model of stateness. Next, Jermaine McCalpin traces the origins of the Congo war from the Leopoldian red rubber terror to the tumultuous botched independence and to Mobutu's protracted and kleptocratic dictatorship. Nevertheless, attributing the inevitability of the Congo war to these historical developments tends to put unreasonably high premium on the past while neglecting both the timing and the recent events that have unfolded in the Great Lakes area in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide. The second and third parts look at the external belligerents of the Congo war, those who intervened to support the Kabila regimes as well as those who sided with the rebel factions to challenge Mobutu's successors. Kevin Dunn (chapter 4) sets the tone by outlining the strategies employed by Laurent Kabila to keep his regime in power, strategies that could be categorized in complementary terms of reliance on foreign alliances and distrust of local and internal constituencies. Thomas Turner (chapter 5) rightfully ties Angola's military intervention in the not only to Luanda's decades-old fight against Savimbi's UNITA rebel movement but also to a broader hegemonic strategy that first unfolded in neighboring CongoBrazzaville when Angolan troops helped Sassou's beleaguered forces crush government militias. Zimbabwe's intervention, in contrast, is lauded by Martin Rupiya (chapter 6) as a selfless, legal, pan-Africanist and SADC-sanctioned mission that saved the from falling into the hands of Rwandan and Ugandan troops even as it burdened Zimbabwe's cash-strapped economy. Although evidence suggests that Zimbabwe's motivations might have been less benevolent, Rupiya lambastes such conspiracy theories as an unrelenting campaign depicting Zimbabwe's involvement as illegitimate, ill-advised, and based on personal quests for enrichment from the gold and diamonds in the DRC (100). …

Le CICR en Afrique: contexte et défis

Résumé Africa is home to many armed conflicts, waged in an environment in which it is already difficult for people to live and for countries to develop. The ICRC has long been and still is widely active there. This article first outlines the general context in which many of the African conflicts take place, giving a brief account of Africa's position in world politics and the prevailing socio-economic conditions. It then goes on to describe the nature of the – mainly internal – armed conflicts that plague the continent. Although most of them seem to have abated, the relative calm remains very fragile. After indicating some of the main characteristics of armed conflict in Africa, the author also points out the effect of a revival of interest in Africa in connection with the global “war on terror”, Finally, the work of the ICRC in Africa is analysed: how is the ICRC perceived on the continent, what does it actually do? And above all, what are the obstacles to efficient humanitarian assistance and protection, and what challenges lie ahead?

RETHINKING AFRICAN STATES

This contribution sketches the paradoxical contrast between Africa and Europe. Europe is the homeland of the strong state, founded on nationalism and sustained by centuries of history. African states are weak and artificial, the result of an arbitrary colonial partition, lacking internal coherence, failing, dysfunctional, even collapsed. What accounts for this difference? Are African states resilient enough to survive the kind of challenges that saw European boundaries change? Are they living on borrowed time on the edge of an abyss that will shortly do to many of them what it has already done to Yugoslavia? Or are they simply different kinds of creatures, marching to their own drums, with the expectation that they will continue in much the same way, despite the upheavals transforming other parts of the world? Understanding what Africa's conflicts are about depends on the answers to these questions.

The impact of political liberalisation and democratisation on ethnic conflict in Africa: an empirical test of common assumptions

This article provides an empirical test of a set of common theoretical assumptions concerning the relationship between political liberalisation, democratisation and ethnic conflict in Africa. The theory in question posits that liberalisation will result in short-term increases in ethnic conflict and that democratisation will be followed by a decrease in ethnic conflict. The article employs a cross-national and time sensitive data set to test this hypothesis in the context of contemporary sub-Saharan Africa. A compelling benefit of this methodology is that it allows for an explanation of variation in ethnic conflict both across states and over time.The results indicate that the relationship between political liberalisation and ethnic conflict is the reverse of what the common assumptions would predict. Liberalisation has had an inverse relationship to ethnic conflict in sub-Saharan Africa between 1988 and 1997. Democratisation does not have the hypothesised effect even when lagged variables are employed. Structural variables as represented by GDP per capita and infant mortality rates are also systematically related to ethnic conflict. The author concludes that policy makers and analysts should continue to pursue both liberalisation and democratisation but should not neglect the central role of an adequate resource base in reducing ethnic conflict in Africa. Political liberalisation and democratic institutions, while providing some measure of relief, are by no means silver bullets for the difficult challenges posed by ethnic conflict in Africa.

Political Settlements in Northern Ireland and South Africa

The article examines comparisons between Northern Ireland's recent peace process and agreement and similar developments in South Africa. On the one hand, the analogy has been used to explain Northern Ireland's conflict and the type of prescription it requires. On the other, it has been employed to suggest ways in which agreement might be achieved in Northern Ireland, or, more recently, why agreement has been reached. These uses of the analogy ignore or downplay crucial contextual differences between the two cases. The most important of these is that while South Africa's conflict took place largely within a single state, Northern Ireland's occurs within a wider British–Irish space. This contextual difference is crucial for understanding the Northern Ireland conflict, the type of institutions required there, and why agreement was reached.

Perspectives on the Horn of Africa's conflict: A cure to prevention of the collapse of the regional countries in the 21st century?

Perspectives on the Horn of Africa's conflict: A cure to prevention of the collapse of the regional countries in the 21st century?

The new is not yet born: conflict resolution in southern Africa

The April 1994 election, in which black and white South Africans vote for the first time for a non-racial government, marks one of the many recent profound changes in Southern Africa. The authors of this book recount how Southern Africa has long endured costly, violent domestic and interstate conflicts, often complicated and intensified by external interventions and interests. They also analyze the various attempts to resolve Southern Africa's conflicts. They suggest that the democratic transition in Southern Africa opens the possibility to create a secure Southern Africa, but they also note that past-conflict legacies and new unanticipated conflicts could stand in the way.

Peacekeeping: the African dimension

Following the end of the cold war there developed a general perception that the United Nations would now be able to adopt a more enhanced role as the world's peacekeeper and peacemaker, especially if it enjoyed the support of the US. This view appeared to be vindicated following the successful US led UN operation to liberate Kuwait from Saddam Hussein in 1991. However, since then the reluctance of the West to become involved in Africa's conflicts unless it is for their own ends, points to establishing an African peacekeeping structure. Yet as this article demonstrates, the political and military structures are not yet in place, nor is there any likelihood that there is any organisation to fill the post‐cold war security vacuum.