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Exploring Violent Conflict Violent civil conflict has been part of the African landscape since the 1950s, though its forms have radically altered. Armed liberation struggle played an important role in the drama of African independence, although sustained guerrilla challenge to colonial rule occurred in only a few territories. In the first three postcolonial decades, civil wars appeared here and there, a first wave in the 1960s generated by abortive decolonizations, inadequate postindependence institutional frames, or separatist movements. An additional set of insurgencies emerged in the 1980s, a product of state crisis. But following the reconfiguration of global and African political parameters in the 1990s, with widespread state crisis, the democracy wave, and the end of the cold war, protracted internal wars ignited over broad stretches of the continent. In a number of respects, these conflicts were driven by novel factors, reflecting the changing political landscape since 1960. The at times high levels of violence and the degree of victimization of civil populations often gave a starkly negative image to the post-1990 rebel movements that stood in bald contrast to the heroic cast of the liberation movements that led the independence struggle.1 The Nolutshungu epigraph points to one of the paradoxes; state destruction was a frequent consequence but not a purpose of their combat.2 227 7 Morphology of Violent Civil Conflict Here, then, is one of the reasons for the near indestructibility of the idea of the post-colonial state. Those who disarranged and nearly destroyed its physical machinery were the most ardent bearers of its ideal. It was thus sustained as a focus and an object of conflict, even where there seemed to be no limit to the disintegration of its material organization and assets. —Sam C. Nolutshungu, 1996 This chapter explores the patterns of violent civil war in Africa, primarily those of the last two decades, underlining an array of attributes distinctive to the current political moment.3 In the 1990s, the number and intensity of such conflicts increased, affecting more than a third of the fifty-three states. Although in some cases (for example, Sudan and Angola), they were continuations of struggles that dated from the independence era, in the majority of instances they were new eruptions. There were a couple of overarching effects of the patterns of the 1980s: a widespread delegitimation of the state and a corrosion of its capacities. I argue that a number of additional novel factors specific to the post-1990 context in both the African and global environment facilitated the outbreak of civil conflict and sustained internal warfare. I explore the nature of these armed conflicts through a detailed examination of a handful of particularly important and protracted instances: Liberia-Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan. Some others are briefly covered in chapters 5 (Chad, Mozambique ) and 6 (Algeria, Rwanda, and Burundi), and the remainder receive brief treatment here. Since 2000, the spread of such conflicts has notably declined; this as well requires attention. To set the stage, I begin with a backward glance at the episodes of guerrilla combat and African warfare of the earlier period. The chapter then turns to the recent episodes of African armed conflict, seeking out their commonalities as well as their differences. In terms of the sequencing of political change in Africa that I have employed , the earlier instances of violent conflict fall into three time phases. The majority of them relate to the liberation struggle era. Although the heart of the battle for decolonization took place at the end of the 1950s and early 1960s, the end point of decolonization came only three decades later, when it finally reached the southern African terminus. The decolonization era gave rise to two types of wars. The first was the armed liberation struggle that began in Algeria in 1954, spread to the Portuguese territories in 1961, and then on to Zimbabwe, Namibia, and South Africa shortly after. A second type of decolonization war occurred in the two countries where armed movements in territories with a distinct colonial identity resisted attachment to existing countries, namely, Western Sahara (Morocco) and Eritrea (Ethiopia). The second phase, the moment of postindependence consolidation, also produced a pair of warfare types. The first arose as a consequence of the failure of the independence settlements to produce a regime capable of governing the entire realm. Into this category falls the 1963–65 Congo rebellions, the sporadic Chad civil wars from 1966 to 1982, and the Angolan civil war that raged from 1975 to 1991...

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