War and Conflict in Africa

Paul D. Williams

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781509509089
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Peace & Global Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

After the Cold War, Africa earned the dubious distinction of being the world's most bloody continent. But how can we explain this proliferation of armed conflicts? What caused them and what were their main characteristics? And what did the world's governments do to stop them?

In this fully revised and updated second edition of his popular text, Paul Williams offers an in-depth and wide-ranging assessment of more than six hundred armed conflicts which took place in Africa from 1990 to the present day - from the continental catastrophe in the Great Lakes region to the sprawling conflicts across the Sahel and the web of wars in the Horn of Africa. Taking a broad comparative approach to examine the political contexts in which these wars occurred, he explores the major patterns of organized violence, the key ingredients that provoked them and the major international responses undertaken to deliver lasting peace.

Part I, Contexts provides an overview of the most important attempts to measure the number, scale and location of Africa's armed conflicts and provides a conceptual and political sketch of the terrain of struggle upon which these wars were waged.

Part II, Ingredients analyses the role of five widely debated features of Africa's wars: the dynamics of neopatrimonial systems of governance; the construction and manipulation of ethnic identities; questions of sovereignty and self-determination; as well as the impact of natural resources and religion.

Part III, Responses, discusses four major international reactions to Africa's wars: attempts to build a new institutional architecture to help promote peace and security on the continent; this architecture's two main policy instruments, peacemaking initiatives and peace operations; and efforts to develop the continent.

War and Conflict in Africa will be essential reading for all students of international peace and security studies as well as Africa's international relations.

Part I
Contexts

Chapter One
Counting Africa's Conflicts (and Their Casualties)

‘Wars’, the Political Instability Task Force concluded ‘can not be measured exactly but only estimated.’¹ This is certainly true in Africa where information about the continent's conflicts is notoriously incomplete, unreliable and usually part of somebody's propaganda machine. As I discuss below, most of the attempts to construct datasets about organized violence in Africa have been based on information produced by governments, international organizations, journalists and NGOs. This is not without its problems.

There are, of course, basic obstacles to gathering data about Africa's war zones related to personal safety and security. But there are other, more fundamental, problems. First, the problem of definition: What, exactly, should analysts be counting – wars, major/minor armed conflicts, battles, massacres, banditry, riots, demonstrations, or all of these things? In sum, what types of events should be taken as indicators of armed conflict, as opposed to, say, criminal acts and individual homicides? Second, the problem of collection: Where should the data come from – journalists, governments, international organizations, NGOs, scholars, or all of them? Media outlets are unable to report on all relevant conflict events; NGOs and international organizations are not uniformly present across the continent; and most African governments have clearly lacked stable and effective bureaucracies charged with collecting relevant information. The third problem is interpretation. Whose interpretation of the data should be considered authoritative? Reporting and analysis of Africa's armed conflicts and relevant events has always produced competing narratives and casualty estimates. Such divergence creates a political minefield for analysts attempting to construct a comprehensive and accurate picture of armed conflicts across the continent. As one recent analysis put it, ‘To obtain reliable figures on who died, where, and when, researchers must not only overcome the practical problems of tallying the dead and injured during wars and rebellions, but also circumvent rival parties' attempts to distort those numbers.’²

As I discuss below, there is no way around these fundamental problems. But they should be acknowledged and the foundations on which the data is based made transparent. This is particularly important given that many of the violent conflicts taking place in contemporary Africa occur on the margins of, or even outside, the African society of states. Consequently, state-centric forms of data collection are increasingly unhelpful. It is dynamics within the ‘non-state world’ and the interaction between states and non-state social forces that provide the most useful insights for understanding current patterns of warfare in Africa.

The purpose of this chapter is to provide an overview of the patterns of armed conflict in Africa, thereby providing a broader historical context of warfare in postcolonial Africa in which to situate the analysis that follows in parts II and III of the book.³ In particular, I examine how analysts have answered such basic questions as: What counts as an armed conflict – and hence what is the universe of relevant cases? Where does Africa fit into global conflict trends? And, how many people have died as a result of Africa's wars?

I do this by approaching questions about the statistics of Africa's conflicts from two directions. First, at a macro level, I compare three frameworks and datasets that have catalogued the number, type and intensity of Africa's armed conflicts. Second, at a more micro level, I look at the problems and politics of trying to develop rigorous and comprehensive information about Africa's wars by examining attempts to count the casualties of the war in Darfur, Sudan (2003–present) and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), (1998–present). For different reasons, both these wars attracted unprecedented efforts to measure the human death toll but in neither case did clear answers emerge. The basic argument can be summarized quickly. At the macro level, not only is there no consensus over how to count Africa's armed conflicts but analysts ignored the non-state dimensions of organized violence for too long. At the micro end of the spectrum, all statistics are political and unreliable and core assumptions about levels of baseline mortality can have drastic effects on the conclusions reached.

The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of the turn towards using geographic information system (GIS) technologies to catalogue patterns of armed conflict in Africa. This geo-spatial turn has generated lots of interesting new data but, predictably, it has not overcome the fundamental problems of definition, collection and interpretation that bedevil this area of study.

Counting Armed Conflicts in Africa

How many armed conflicts has Africa witnessed in the post-Cold War period? There is no simple and uncontested answer. Nevertheless, a good place to start is with the answers provided by three efforts to compile comprehensive data: the Political Instability Task Force (PITF), Monty Marshall's 2006 study for the UK government, and the Uppsala Conflict Data Programme (UCDP).

The Political Instability Task Force Version

The PITF was originally formed in 1994 at the request of senior policymakers in the US government. It comprised a core group of ten to fifteen leading scholars from various US universities. Its remit was ‘to assess and explain the vulnerability of states around the world to political instability and state failure’. The Task Force's aspiration was to ‘develop statistical models that can accurately assess countries' prospects for major political change and can identify key risk factors of interest to US policymakers’. Regardless of the predictive quality of its subsequent models, the PITF's dataset provides a useful starting point for studying the broad contours of armed conflict in postcolonial Africa. It catalogues a variety of ‘state failure events’ which encompass a range of severe political conflicts and regime crises, specifically, revolutionary wars, ethnic wars, adverse regime changes, and genocides and politicides.⁴

The Task Force's concept of ‘complex events’ such as those in Sudan between 1983 and the present, Chad between 1965 and 1994, and Central African Republic from 2003 to present is particularly useful in the African context. These complex events are understood as being ‘made up of two or more temporally linked wars and crises. If events overlap or if five years or less separate the end of one event and the onset of the next distinct event, they are combined into complex events (subsequent flare-ups of events are considered continuations).’⁵ This concept is useful precisely because Africa's wars rarely have neat beginnings or endings. As David Keen o...