African Conflicts and Informal Power: Big Men and Networks ed. by Mats Utas (review)

In African Conflicts and Informal Power: Big Men and Networks, Mats Utas has edited an excellent volume made up of contributions from prominent anthropologists and political scientists. The contributors present both country and thematic case studies, augmented by empirical research emanating from fieldwork studies, mostly done in western Africa. The volume is an excellent contribution to the scholarship of African conflicts and an excellent sequel to Christopher Clapham’s African Guerrillas (1998).

In the introduction, Utas stresses that, in Africa, war “does not imply the collapse of everything; [but] a venturing into total anarchy. Alternative forms of control and management establish themselves when formal governance is diminished” (p. 2). Probably, there is no place in a general African context that such illuminating assertions are truer than in Somalia, except that writing about western Africa, Utas does not have Somalia in mind, although there has not been a functioning government for more than three decades in Somalia, and the politics of patronage in post-conflict trajectories exist there.

Part one consists of four chapters of country case studies in West Africa, which discuss conflict-ridden nations in the subregion; a fifth chapter is on Uganda, an eastern African country that has suffered a similar plight. Part two consists of well-researched empirical studies in five excellent chapters, for which, as in part one, most of the contributors did ethnographic research during brutal armed conflicts in the 1990s and early 2000s. The researchers, in their encounters with local people, succeeded in establishing invisible camaraderie with warlords and their militias, whom they do not seem to criticize in any way, probably reflecting the obviously unholy alliance or relationship; nonetheless, several contributors appear congenial to the warlords and other nonstate actors in the conflicts.

Thematically, this collection reiterates the fact that when the state shrivels, the ensuing vacuum paves the way for big men—a loose, nonstate, heterogeneous group, competing for the spoils of the conflict. Such groups spring up at the margins of state institutions. A big man is referred to as a modern-day postconflict sultan, credited with “the ability to command, to instate mass action, where authority is not structurally ascribed and socio-historically motivated [by being] based on the Big Man’s ability to create a following and to large extent dependent on his informal abilities to assist people” (p. 6). In Guinea-Bissau, the big men are known as homigarandi; in Somalia, afarjeeble, slang for ‘wealthy warlords’. In the foregoing context, what emerges is the term bigmanity, which depends upon time and space, but its originator is unknown.

In several instances, the notion of bigmanity does not emanate from the local citizenry; at times, the collection touches on a big man like Gus Kouwenhoven, a well-known Dutch national, who operated in war-torn Liberia and is now allegedly serving a prison sentence in the Netherlands. Alleged examples of similar big men include a French oil manager who was in Mogadishu in the early 1990s and Giancarlo Marocchino, an Italian who lived in the capital for the better part of the 1990s, when he reportedly operated in the Somali clan wars. In 1993, he was reported to have been briefly arrested and detained by United Nations troops in Somalia. As readers learn from African Conflicts and Informal Power, if not for alleged war traders like Kouwenhove and Marocchino, African conflicts might have been less destructive, and the pursuit of spoils and resources in such wars would have been minimal.

The contributors acknowledge how war transforms societies, yet the way that it metamorphoses does not illustrate dependence upon the society caught in the warfare. Therefore, several contributors are wary of postconflict conditions as they observe that breaking the war structures, consolidating communal peace, and rebuilding state institutions would, to say the least, take many years, and that a relapse is more or less probable. Also, the observations by Ilmari Käihkö, in his contributing essay, demonstrate that there is...