Conflict & Security in Africa ed. by Rita Abrahamsen (review)

This is a collection of articles from the Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE) in response to demands for a reader that can be used for teaching and advocacy. To succeed, readers need to bring together widely scattered articles that offer insights and critical approaches that are still relevant a decade or more after their original publication. It is a tough challenge over and above the usual problems of edited volumes, where achieving coherence in terms of analysis and consistency in terms of quality is so often a difficulty. To take almost all fourteen articles (with two exceptions) from a single journal makes the task seem even more daunting, not only in terms of the size of the pool in which to fish, but in terms of potentially restricting the breadth of viewpoints.

But the volume’s theme is definitely serious and important enough to justify the approach. What the international community perceives as a major problem in the world is certainly worthy of academic probing, if only to expose the shallowness of understanding of African realities on the ground and of what ‘conflict’, ‘peace’ and ‘security’ mean for different actors. Likewise, there is indeed a case to be made for the argument that the solutions offered by the usual interventionist powers in peacemaking and security reform are not as self-evident as claimed and that there are in fact alternatives. It is in these areas that the volume has a lot to offer.

We are alerted to the fact that the nature of conflict has changed significantly since the Cold War. Not only have conflicts become intra-state and often resource-based, but ‘the war on terror’ has in some ways brought back the geopolitics of fear (not of Reds, but of Terrorists; not of Soviet allies, but of Al Qaeda allies). In post-Cold War Africa, the apparent villains are not so much diplomats offering money for political loyalty as, amongst others, foreign firms offering weak and/or greedy rulers inducements in exchange for their resources (see the chapters by William Reno on Sierra Leone, Patrick Johnston on Liberia, Susan Willett on arms procurement across the continent, and both Michael Watts and Cyril Obi on the Niger Delta). According to the authors, it is not just Western business but Western diplomacy that is contributing to indigenous problems. Too often, external ‘interventions’ to build peace have promoted armed conflict (see Patricia Daley on Burundi), attempts to eradicate global terrorism have fuelled it (see Ken Menkhaus on Somalia) and policies aimed at promoting democracy through liberalization have opened up space for bandits (see Musambayi Katumanga on Nairobi).

But while it may be too much to expect every piece in a reader to be seminal, several chapters do show their age. We are in the time when Blair is British prime minister, when Strasser has just been ousted in a military coup in Sierra Leone, when the new president of Nigeria is Yar’Adua, when Chissano is about to defeat Renamo’s Dhlakama in presidential elections in Mozambique, and when it could be said that religion plays ‘a relatively minor role’ in African conflicts. However much we might like to think that they encapsulate timeless principles, in many ways the accounts do seem to be yesterday’s stories.

Rita Abrahamsen, however, is persuasive in demonstrating that a shared political economy approach offers just such a principle. In her fine introduction she dismisses the idea that African conflict is no more than ‘criminal activity, instigated by greedy, self-interested war lords’ and poor youths with nothing to lose. For her and the other authors, a political economy approach is much broader. At the very least it means that the global nature of conflict has to be recognized, with key elements being transnational corporations, global trading inequalities, and the political and ideological agendas of rich nations. What this volume excels at is the tracing of the structural and social relations that...