Understanding Recent African Wars

When the Cold War ended, the Western world looked for an economic dividend. The Clinton re-election slogan captured the mood of the moment – ‘It’s the economy, stupid’. Even the social scientific study of war was affected. For a period the focus shifted to war economy, to the exclusion of many other factors causing and sustaining outbreaks of armed conflict. Al-Qaida’s war of terror against the United States and its allies – a war intended to convey to Muslim audiences that the Caliphate might once again be restored in an era of electronic globalization (Sageman 2004) – reinstated an older focus. Ideology, politics and religion once again assumed a central position as causes of war. Despite the furore over terrorism – in itself no new phenomenon – the basics of social theory in regard to war remain unchanged. Wars (of any kind) need to be understood in their strategic, motivational, organizational and occupational aspects. How effective are the social sciences in tracking and explaining post-Cold War conflicts in Africa? Wars in coastal upper West Africa, the Great Lakes region, Darfur/Chad, northern Uganda/southern Sudan and the Horn of Africa have posed major explanatory challenges. The six books considered in this review article sample the state of the art. We have organized our discussion in terms of three major questions: what do we know about contemporary war in Africa (and how do we know it); what is contemporary war in Africa like; and what causes contemporary war in Africa.

KNOWING ABOUT CONTEMPORARY WAR IN AFRICA

Wars are generally too dangerous, complex and fast-moving to be grasped by established empirical methods of social science research. Some try. This has stimulated an interesting attempt by Hoffman and Lubkemann (2005), writing about the Mano River conflicts, to establish a war-oriented anthropology of ‘events’, building on earlier attempts to open an interface between war reporting and critically informed social science analysis of African war (Allen and Seaton 1999). Most investigators opt for the more feasible option of stepping back, taking a comparative, methodologically plural approach. War – among other things – is an attempt to engage the emotions. So asking the right questions at a distance is perhaps to be preferred over ‘being there’ and becoming overwhelmed by the horror or pity of events.

A particular methodological issue to engage attention is that much of the accessible material on war is testimony, largely generated in the aftermath of events. Huge amounts of material are produced by war crimes tribunals and truth and reconciliation commissions. Human rights enquiries, problem-solving conflict transformation and Track Two peace negotiations add their own quota, often derived from facilitated group discussions. Researchers also undertake their own interviews, of course, but often in a situation where access depends on a powerful protector. It is not only journalists that are ‘embedded’. An ‘agency-led’ agenda of enquiry is sometimes all too evident.

Testimony has thus come under scrutiny (Mkandawire 2002; Fanthorpe 2006). Testimony-led accounts certainly need to be crosschecked. They are perhaps only truly compelling when opposing factions in a war concur on its causes (Peters 2006) or different genders, and status or age groups, make similar...