Unrest In Africa Research Articles

Contagion to unrest: Investigating the link between disease and civil unrest in Africa.

Scholars, policymakers, and citizens alike remain invested in the impact of infectious diseases worldwide. Studies have found that emerging diseases and disease outbreaks burden global economies and public health goals. This article explores the potential link between measles outbreaks and various forms of civil unrest, such as demonstrations, riots, strikes, and other anti-government violence, in four central African countries from 1996 to 2005. Using a difference-in-differences model, we examine whether disease outbreaks have a discernible impact on the prevalence of civil unrest. While our findings indicate that the relationship between disease and civil unrest is not as strong as previously suggested, we identify a notable trend that warrants further investigation. These results have significant implications for health and policy officials in understanding the complex interplay between state fragility, civil unrest, and the spread of disease.

Russia-Ukraine War, its Impacts on Food Security in Africa

The study examines the pattern of food inflation in Africa, the extent to which Russia-Ukraine war impacted food inflation in Africa and find out whether the war going on between Russia and Ukraine is likely to instigate social unrest in Africa. The study was a longitudinal panel design. Three research questions guided the study. The population comprised 39 time series data points which spanned January 2019 to March 2022 on food inflation for the 54 African countries. A sample size of four countries comprising of Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya and Morocco were purposively selected. Data were sourced from Trading Economics database and analyzed using descriptive analysis trend analysis, mean, and percentage. Results showed that Nigeria recorded the highest food inflation rate relative to the other sampled countries. Morocco recorded the least food inflation rate. However, Morocco and Kenya were struck the most by food prices as a result of the war. The study also found out that the continuous rise in food prices has the potential to spark social unrest in Africa. The paper recommends that government at all level should ensure that security of life and property is guarantee. That way farmers can safely go about with their agricultural activities.

Cross-Border Factors Behind Social Unrest in Africa: An Analysis of Biofuel Production, Oil Price, Speculations, and the Us Dollar Index

Cross-Border Factors Behind Social Unrest in Africa: An Analysis of Biofuel Production, Oil Price, Speculations, and the Us Dollar Index

Conflict on the urban fringe: Urbanization, environmental stress, and urban unrest in Africa

Most research on the security implications of environmental and demographic change does not explicitly distinguish between urban and rural areas. While statistical conflict analyses are increasingly sophisticated with respect to spatial and substantive disaggregation they largely ignore the possibility that urban and rural areas may be affected differently. In Africa, a continent assumed to be particularly vulnerable to the social and economic externalities of environmental and demographic change, less than one percent of the land mass is defined as ‘urban’. Yet, the population that lives in African cities is expected to increase by more than 150% between 2020 and 2050 according to UN population forecasts, massively outpacing rural population growth estimated at 35%. Given the vast social transformation associated with this process of rapid urbanization, understanding the dynamics and consequences of urban population growth in Sub-Saharan Africa, and its possible relationship with environmental factors is key to reducing vulnerabilities and facilitating sustainable urban growth on the continent. In this article we argue that high urban population growth may strain the provision of public services in urban areas, heighten competition over scarce urban land, and increase the chances of urban social unrest. We expect population pressure to have the most profound effects on social unrest in peri-urban areas, meaning the urban outskirts. We further investigate whether environmental push factors, operationalized as droughts happening in rural areas proximate to the urban centers, could be driving any effect of urban population growth on social disorder, possibly supporting concerns over climate change-induced social unrest. We test our expectations on a sample of similarly sized urban and peri-urban ‘grid cells’ covering the whole of the African continent for the 1997–2010 period, using geo-coded social unrest data. Our analysis shows that urban population growth is associated with increased unrest in the peri-urban areas only. We find no evidence, however, that this relationship is driven by environmental push factors in the form of nearby droughts. The study contributes insights relevant to the broader debates about possible security implications of hyper-urbanization and climate change.

The hunger games: Food prices, ethnic cleavages and nonviolent unrest in Africa

Nonviolent movements are more successful when mobilizing large and diverse numbers of participants. However, while there has been considerable research on the outcomes of nonviolent campaigns, far less is known about the initial emergence of nonviolent action. A growing literature suggests ethnic divisions may undermine the ability of activists to engage in mass nonviolent mobilization across diverse social lines. Yet many large and diverse nonviolent movements have successfully emerged in various ethnically divided societies across the world. I argue that nonviolent mobilization is made possible in ethnically polarized contexts when broader cross-cutting grievances are present as they enable local activists to widen their appeal across social lines. I focus on food price spikes as an example of a cross-cutting issue that is likely to affect consumers from different ethnic groups. The unique and symbolic nature of food price spikes facilitates nonviolent mobilization across ethnic lines and provides clear short-term incentives for many people to participate in protests against the government. Using new spatially disaggregated data on government targeted nonviolent action, I analyse grid-cell years across 41 African countries (1990–2008). I find strong evidence that food price spikes increase the likelihood of nonviolent action in politically excluded and ethnically diverse locations.

Terrorist assassinations and societal unrest in Africa: a research brief

ABSTRACTThis exploratory research brief examines social unrest in Africa in the aftermath of terrorist assassinations. Assassination is a tactic of violence in modern terrorist campaigns and assassinations are interwoven across the African continent with social conflict events such as demonstrations and riots. Utilizing survival analysis, this article finds variation in the likelihood of social unrest across five African subregions and tests for the type of event most likely to occur after a terrorist assassination. Analyses of data on thirty-seven African states drawn from the Global Terrorism Database and Social Conflict Analysis Database from 1990–2015 suggest that demonstrations may be more likely than riots in the aftermath of a terrorist assassination in Africa and that these events are more likely to be spontaneous, rather than organized, in nature.

Grievances, Latent Anger and Unrest in Africa

ABSTRACTThe conflict literature identifies various types of grievance, greed, aggravating and mitigating factors that contribute to unrest. Drawing on such literature, we conceptualize “latent anger” as an aggregate or conduit measure of these factors and as a precursor to various forms of unrest. Using the multiple indicator–multiple cause model, the relationships between various socioeconomic factors and latent anger and between latent anger and several forms of unrest are estimated based on 1998–2015 country-level panel data on unrest in Africa. Empirical findings show the contributions of unemployment, infant mortality, urbanization, democracy, and government instability in fomenting “latent anger” and its differential impacts on domestic and transnational terrorism, battles, riots, and other forms of unrest. This approach also yielded country indices of the variable “latent anger” that reveal country vulnerabilities to unrest and may be used as an early warning indicator.

The study of violence and social unrest in Africa: A comparative analysis of three conflict event datasets

The study of violence and social unrest in Africa: A comparative analysis of three conflict event datasets

Social Conflict in Africa: A New Database

We describe the Social Conflict in Africa Database (SCAD), a new event dataset for conducting research and analysis on various forms of social and political unrest in Africa. SCAD contains information on over 7,200 instances of protests, riots, strikes, government repression, communal violence, and other forms of unrest for 47 African countries from 1990–2010. SCAD includes information on event dates, actors and targets, lethality, georeferenced location information, and other conflict attributes. This article gives an overview of the data collection process, presents descriptive statistics and trends across the continent, and compares SCAD to the widely used Banks event data. We believe that SCAD will be a useful resource for scholars across multiple disciplines as well as for the policy community.

After the Rain: Rainfall Variability, Hydro-Meteorological Disasters, and Social Conflict in Africa

This paper examines the relationship between rainfall, water, and socio-political unrest in Africa. In particular, we are interested in how deviations from normal rainfall patterns, and extreme events such as flooding and drought, affect the propensity for individuals and groups to engage in disruptive activities such as demonstrations, riots, strikes, communal conflict, and anti-government violence. In contrast to much of the environmental security literature, we use a much broader definition of conflict that includes, but is not is not limited to, organized rebellion. Using a new database of over 6,000 instances of social conflict in the past 20 years - the Social Conflict in Africa Database (SCAD) - we examine the effect of deviations from normal rainfall patterns on various types of conflict. Our results indicate that rainfall variability has a significant effect on both large-scale and smaller-scale instances of political conflict. We find that rainfall is correlated with civil war and insurgency, although wetter years are more likely to suffer from violent events. Extreme deviations in rainfall - particularly dry and wet years - are associated with all types of political conflict (violent and nonviolent, government-targeted and non/government-targeted), though the relationship is strongest with respect to violent events, which are more responsive to abundant rather than scarce rainfall. By looking at a broader spectrum of social conflict, rather than limiting the analysis to civil war, we demonstrate a robust relationship between environmental shocks and violence.

“Quick, Ethel, Your Rifle!”: Portable Britishness and Flexible Gender Roles in G.A. Henty’s Books for Boys

Out on Pampas. With Clive In India. With Roberts to Pretoria. Maori and Settler. By Pike and by Dyke. These titles are no longer familiar, though their author, George Alfred Henty, dominated children's literature between 1871 and 1906. wildly prolific Victorian adventure writer had been among first correspondents who traveled globe and sent reports to London via telegraph. In this capacity, he covered Crimean and American Civil Wars, traveled through Near and Middle East, and documented colonial unrest in Africa and Pacific. His name thus carried cultural clout, adding further credibility to his for came to be known as The Boys' Historian, whose 90-odd children's novels were crafted to foster imperial spirit in young men by supplying absolutely trustworthy accounts of all great wars in which English people have been engaged since Norman Conquest (The Cornet Horse i-ii). These jingoist, racist novels, often accompanied by Henty's dedicatory essays to My Dear Lads, proved so that schools regularly limited number each student could borrow per week. Historian Bernard Porter describes a public school headmaster, for example, donating popular novels by ultra-imperialist G.A. Henty (52) for student use in 1890s. Circulated in libraries, purchased by parents, awarded as Sunday school and boys' club prizes, and read as history textbooks for Civil Service exams, Henty's canon, in words his biographer George Manville Fenn, taught more lasting history to boys than all schoolmasters his generation (320). Fenn's assessment suggests extent to which Henty's success hinged on his novels' educational appeal: including pirated editions, twenty-five million books were sold before 1914 (Arnold 17). (1) While many these boy readers later died in trenches Marne and Somme, names others who lived to recall fondly--Arthur Schlesinger, J. Paul Getty, Wendell Willkie, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, A. J. P. Taylor, Henry Miller, and Winston Churchill--speak to his lasting influence. Yet theirs became last who considered as a household name. During past five to ten years, however, Henty's canon has experienced a revival, in large part because American advocates schooling have rediscovered and promoted his work. Numerous reviews in right-wing and conservative Christian journals and websites applaud Henty's texts as model readings and thoughtful presents for children, especially boys. (2) These reviews often ignore Henty's racism by packaging his version empire as refreshingly heroic and patriotic. In New Criterion, for example, Brooke Allen claims: failure multiculturalism to provide American students with a truly multicultural education or worldview has been dismal, as we found out in panicked scramble for information and enlightenment after September 11 attacks. If we had all been reading Henty's To Herat and Kabul instead Babysitter's Club as children, we might have been better prepared! (23) In a column on American Right for Economist, Adrian Wooldridge specifies Henty's primary audience as the growing number people who, out religious conviction, academic frustration and, thanks to a spate school shootings, simple fear, choose to educate their children at home (30). These parents see as a hero ... [whose] books relentlessly preach virtues family loyalty, female modesty and patriotism (30). According to Wooldridge, many schoolers are so persuaded by ideological content Henty's novels that demand still exceeds supply (30) reprints. Before this boom in interest, Henty's novels were rare books, seldom if ever republished. Now Robinson Books, an Oregon-based publisher, has formatted ninety-nine novels as a CD-rom set. …

Frontiersmen: Warfare in Africa since 1950

Since 1950, there has been almost continuous military unrest in Africa. This study offers an overview of warfare in this period, examining a military tradition that ranges from the highly sophisticated electronic, air and armour fighting between South Africa and Angola-Cuban forces, to the spears and machetes of the Rwandan genocide. The author explores two themes: first, that warfare in North Africa has principally been a matter of identity and secondly, that warfare south of the Sahara is comparable with that of pre-colonial Africa - conflicts of frontiersmen trying to extend their control over land and resources. Exploring liberation campaigns, civil wars, ethnic conflicts and wars between nations, this study provides an authoritative military history of Africa over half a century.

Bureaucracy and Political Unrest in Africa

Bureaucracy and Political Unrest in Africa