I had not thought much, or rather systematically, about the causes and costs of Africa’s conflicts. To be sure, I was only too aware that violent conflicts—from wars to revolutions—are the midwives of historical change, some of it progressive. Indeed, the wars of national liberation were inevitable and indispensable for African societies to regain their humanity and historical agency so cruelly seized by European colonialism. But besides the anti-colonial wars I don’t see any redeeming value in the other wars that have afflicted twentieth century Africa—the imperial wars, intra-state wars, and inter-state wars. I have become more convinced than ever that as individuals committed to Africa’s recovery, renewal, and yes, renaissance, from the ravages and legacies of colonial terror and postcolonial tyranny our contribution goes beyond designing ever more intricate development models or fancy policy prescriptions.
Africa’s development impasse is not a technocratic problem that can be overcome through technical tinkering by development specialists or better theories from academics, let alone by the idiotic carnivals of western self-indulgence. Rather, African policy makers, civil society, and intellectuals need to appreciate more keenly the horrendous costs of Africa’s violent conflicts, to focus squarely on the causes and costs of these conflicts and devise effective mechanisms of conflict resolution and strategies of post-conflict reconstruction. Africa’s yawning developmental and democratic deficits, I believe, can in large part be attributed to the continent’s violent conflicts.
Many of these conflicts reflect and are spawned by the lingering structural deformities bequeathed by colonialism, some are fueled by postcolonial Africa’s staggering failures to achieve the enduring dreams of uhuru, and others are fanned by new forms of imperialism, often cloaked in the giddy rhetoric of globalization, that are engendering new contexts and excuses for imperialist adventures, which are stoking local and regional conflicts across the world. A particularly egregious recent example of this is the so-called U.S.-led “war on terror,” a crusade that has already left a trail of wanton destruction in Iraq and Afghanistan, and shattered the shaky scaffolding of global order.
The intersections of local, national, regional, and international factors instigating, facilitating, aggravating, or prolonging violent conflicts of course vary from one conflict to another. The national and transnational linkages and complexes that spawn, sustain, or shape Africa’s conflicts are obviously multidimensional. It is certainly the case that many of Africa’s dictatorial regimes, whose very existence has often been a source of conflict, in so far as the closure of political space tends to channel opposition into armed revolts and rebel movements, are sometimes sponsored and supported by foreign powers and interests. This was especially true during the Cold War. Both states and non-state actors, including the notorious warlords, often use or turn to transnational formations into networks of plunder that nourish civil wars.
The various violent conflicts that have afflicted Africa for the past century have exacted an incalculable toll on the continent’s societies, polities, and economies, robbing them of their developmental potential and democratic possibilities. The causes of the conflicts are as complicated as the challenges of resolving them are difficult. There can be no singular explanation for or solution to Africa’s conflicts because these conflicts are rooted in the complex constructions and conjunctures of Africa’s political economies, social identities, and cultural ecologies as configured out of specific local, national, and regional historical experiences and patterns of insertion into, and engagement with, an ever-changing world system. In so far as the causes of the conflicts are multiple in their dynamics—internal and external, local and transnational, economic and political, social and cultural, historical and contemporary, objective and subjective, material and ideological, concrete and emotive, systemic and symbolic, real and rhetorical—the strategies for managing and resolving them can only be multidimensional.
But the immense costs of these conflicts cannot be in doubt, or the need, indeed the urgency, to resolve them if the continent is to navigate the twenty-first century more successfully than it did with the twentieth. Violent conflicts exact a heavy toll on society, the economy, and the environment, both directly and indirectly through deaths and injuries, sexual crimes and intimidation, population dislocations within and across national borders, the damage they cause to human and physical capital that undermines production and leads to economic stagnation, insecurity and distortion of state expenditures, and the disruptions they engender for societal networks and the fragile social capital of trust and interpersonal associations and intergroup interactions, not to mention the devastation of the ecosystem, agricultural lands and wildlife, the destruction of society’s material and mechanical infrastructures, the outflow of resources including “capital flight” and “brain drain,” the proliferation of pathological and self-destructive behaviors, and the deterioration in the aesthetic quality of life.
One of Africa’s key developmental challenges, therefore, centers on how best to manage and resolve violent conflicts. Effective and sustainable conflict management and resolution require, at the very least, dealing with the root causes of the conflicts, as well as the consequences left behind by the conflict in question, which may set new sources of future conflict. Of course various institutions and instruments have been developed at local, national, regional, and continental levels to regulate and resolve conflicts of various types, but many have not worked as well as they should because of their underdeveloped institutional frameworks and structures, weak early warning systems and risk assessment capacities, and lack of integrated processes and methods to deal with issues related to human rights, democracy, and good governance.
In the end, the most powerful antidotes to violent conflict are sustainable development, social equity and justice, and democratic governance. The pursuit of these objectives entails profound transformations in a country’s political economy and social ecology, in the prevailing structural conditions and subjective consciousness that engender conflicts; in short, changing the realities and rhetoric of power and poverty, and the terms of economic development, social differentiation, political discourse, cultural demarcation and difference, and the social contract of common citizenship.
The majority of postcolonial African conflicts have been intra-state rather than inter-state, although of course they often have a regional context or consequences so that neighboring countries have a vested interest in ensuring that they do not spill over or that they are resolved. Clearly, the greatest physical threat to most Africans is not from neighbors or governments in foreign countries but neighbors or governments in their own country. In this context, ‘security’ conceived in terms of enhancing the military capacity of the state makes little sense. High military expenditures represent a waste of potentially valuable resources for development and also enhance state capacity for domestic repression and aggressive adventurism abroad. In short, there is need to rethink the concept of “security” tied to militarism, which at best creates the negative peace of deterrence, rather than the positive peace and security that can only arise from the elimination of the causes of war and violence and the protection of human rights and social justice within and between countries. What is needed is ‘democratic security’: enhancing and ensuring the security of people, not just states. Africa’s regional organizations ought to adopt this conception of security more aggressively—incorporate collective regional security with social and economic development
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The magnitude and impact of Africa’s violent conflicts is often lost between hysteria and apathy—the panic expressed among Africa’s friends and indifference exhibited by its foes—for a continent mired in, and supposedly dying from, an endless spiral of self-destruction. The distortions that mar discussions and depictions of African conflicts are rooted in the longstanding tendency to treat African social phenomena as abnormal, beyond the pale of humanity or rational explanation. We need to be wary of the many orthodoxies circulating in academe and the daily mills of oversimplification and sensationalism—the mass media: the apocalyptic view that depicts African conflicts as senseless madness, the culturalist view according to which conflicts are culturally encoded, that is, ‘natural’ to Africans (remember the ‘inter-tribal’ lore of colonial conquerors and anthropology), or the neopatrimonial perspective that attributes conflicts to the self-destructive logic of Africa’s proverbial patron-client politics.
Particularly seductive but worrisome is the rational choice paradigm of some economists—the ‘looting model of rebellion’—that violent conflicts are primarily motivated by the desire to loot resources. Many of the propagators of this view are affiliated with the World Bank or work for donor agencies that have done so much to damage African economies and development prospects thereby generating or exacerbating violent conflicts in parts of the continent. Obviously economic factors are crucial to understanding the causes and consequences of conflict, but economic determinism from the new triumphalist right is as facetious as from the old vanquished left, and conflating political rebels with common criminals, enabling with causal factors, and individual and collective rationality is too reductionistic.
Our analyses of Africa’s violent conflicts need to go beyond the conventional and fashionable analyses of Africanist scholarship, often inflected with, if not infected by, Afropessimism, or the dismissive and demeaning stereotypes conveyed in the western media infused with Afrophobia. Certainly, African scholars should not ignore examining the developmental and democratic costs of violent conflicts seriously and soberly because of misguided analyses by others who hail from societies that, historically, have never wished Africa well, and indeed have contributed to the creation of many of the conditions that either spawn or sustain these conflicts.
In my view, there is a compelling case to be made for seeing violent conflicts as a major source of Africa’s development impasse, whatever the explanations of the causes and trajectories of these conflicts. While we must resist racist smears of all Africa with conflict, there are, at any one time, significant zones of violent conflict in various parts of the continent. Comprehensive and comparative studies of violent conflicts across the continent, covering all five regions, would yield important lessons. Understandably we tend to be concerned about contemporary conflicts, but as a historian I cannot help but think that analyses over a much longer period, including the colonial era, would deepen our understanding of the history of violent conflicts in Africa. Temporal depth needs to be matched by thematic breadth on conflict dimensions that tend to be relatively invisible. For example, there can be little doubt that these conflicts are gendered in their causes, courses, and consequences. They are also differentiated in the way they involve and impact different generations, from the youth to the elderly. The role of religion as a source of conflict, in objective and subjective terms, institutionally and ideologically, and at local, regional and transnational levels cannot be overemphasized.
And when discussing the global forces and transnational networks behind violent conflicts the tendency is to examine the imperial and neo-colonial agendas of the major powers. More attention ought to be paid to the activities of other transnational actors, such as business enterprises, advocacy organizations, and even academic establishments. In this context, the role of diaspora communities needs to be accorded specific attention as diaspora networks have become increasingly critical in not only fanning, facilitating, and financing conflicts in Africa, but sometimes in resolving them and assisting in postconlict recovery and reconstruction.
The challenge is to ensure that African conflicts are analyzed in their own multifaceted contexts, while avoiding seeing them as manifestations of some unique African cultural compulsion, political pathology, social sickness, or moral malady. Violent conflict in Africa is indeed part of the human drama and world history, but the tendency to impose universalist models of conflict driven from stylized Western experiences or faddish theorizing must be resisted if only because such paradigms lead to poor analysis and bad policy. The subject of violent conflicts in Africa is too serious a matter, and their developmental costs too grave, for glib modeling or lazy journalistic speculation uninformed by the histories of, and unmindful of the concrete conditions in, the societies under scrutiny. Ending violent conflicts, I submit, is a prerequisite for transcending Africa’s development impasse.
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