Clausewitz and African Wars: Politics and Strategy in Liberia and Somalia (review)

With the phenomenal rise in civil wars that spill across borders in a literal and figurative sense, academics have joined policymakers and other researchers in churning out an impressive list of studies exploring the subject. This book links all such conflicts to a Clausewitzean conception of war. Without denying the role of profiteers and ethnic and religious entrepreneurs, Isabelle Duyvesteyn's focus is war (albeit of the privatized violence and state-conflict type) as politics by other means.

Duyvesteyn juxtaposes trinitarian and nontrinitarian interpretations of African wars employing Liberia and Somalia as case studies. The trinitarian, or Clausewitzean, view holds that the main operating factors in war are politics as seen in government monopoly of force, military power exercised by an army, and collaboration between government and the people in service to the state. Thus the trinity of political leadership, a followership, and military potentials. On the other side of the coin is the nontrinitarian argument that seeks to excise the state and its attributes, leaving "warlords, bandits, drug barons and other enterprising individuals... as the main actors in warfare today"(2).

The latter perspective on African wars was popularized by the journalist Robert Kaplan in his 1994 essay, "The Coming Anarchy," subsequently published in book form. Kaplan describes, from his brief West African excursion, restless "hordes" of young men behaving like "loose molecules in a very unstable social fluid that was clearly on the verge of igniting" (2000:46). This collapse of West African order was symbolic of an Africa-wide, if not a worldwide, anarchy soon to threaten Western civilization. The author cites other nontrinitarian scholars such as William Reno and Stephen Ellis.

Duyvesteyn compares wars in Liberia (1989–97) with those in Somalia (1988–95) to advance her main argument, the trinitarian thesis of actors, interests, and instruments interacting to ends that are always political (i.e., concerned with power, authority, and rule). Actors involved in armed conflict in which the state structures have collapsed are political actors because of the "trinity of political leadership, armed force, and people" (9). Interests are seen in the political agenda of actors ("rebel[s] without a [noble] cause," not without an agenda). To complete the trinity, actors use military force as a political instrument and fight as much as possible in a conventional manner, resorting to unorthodox means because limited resources cause violence to degenerate "into brutalizing terror, plumbing the depths of depravity" (6). Another feature of the analysis is the acceptance of patrimonial rule as characteristic of African politics. The quest for power in both Liberia and Somalia never questioned the basis of authoritarian power, but rather "the hands in which the rule rested." In each case "how the country should be ruled was less important than who should rule it. The military factions of [Charles] Taylor and [Mohammed] Aidid were after power, as it existed under Doe and Barre" (76).

Such an analysis may harbor shortcomings. The quest for power, at least in the case of Liberia, was initially a coalition opposition effort, not Taylor's alone. There were important elements questioning authoritarian power itself and claiming a last resort right of "fighting fire with fire" in order to place the country on a democratic path. Moreover, there is a developing literature on African politics that suggests democratic arrangements at microlevels or at the periphery rather than the center of modern political systems.

The book concludes that the Clausewitz thesis holds, rather than the explanations offered by analysts of the changing nature of war such as Kaplan's irrational chaos and anarchy, or Reno's rational competition for resources. Clausewitz holds because such empirical evidence as the author can adduce from Liberia and Somalia sustains the trinitarian explanation of war. These and other African wars are focused on politics, the state, and the "instrumental use of military force." Thus the age of the state is still with us, and war as instrument of...