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Deciphering Disorder in Africa: Is Identity the Key?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2011

Crawford Young
Crawford Young
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin-Madison
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Extract

At the beginning of the 1990s, a wave of democratization raised new hopes for peace in Africa, but as the decade progressed, violent politics spread and formed two large arcs of conflict that weakened or even collapsed states could not contain. This review article examines five recent books that address the potential impact of identity politics on civil violence in Africa. Two of the authors—Donald Horowitz and Ted Gurr—address these issues in a global comparison, while the other three—Luis Martinez, Stephen Ellis, and Mahmood Mamdani—examine important African instances of protracted internal warfare, in Algeria, Liberia, and Rwanda, respectively. Is identity politics the primary instigator of disorder? What is die impact of a prolonged period of state crisis upon communal relationships? The volumes under review offer useful insights, but large questions remain.

Type
Review Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 54 , Issue 4 , July 2002 , pp. 532 - 557
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 2002

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References

1 Two especially influential works are Bratton, Michael and Walle, Nicolas van de, Democratic Experiments in Africa: Regime Transitions in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Joseph, Richard, ed., State, Conflict and Democracy in Africa (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1999)Google Scholar.

2 See the skeptical assessments by Walle, van de, African Economies and the Politics of Permanent Crisis, 1979–1999 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lancaster, Carol, Aid to Africa: So Much to Do, So Little Time (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999)Google Scholar; and Callaghy, Thomas and Ravenhill, John, eds., Hemmed In: Responses to Africa's Economic Crisis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993)Google Scholar.

3 A systematic comparison is undertaken in Beissinger, Mark R. and Young, Crawford, eds., Beyond State Crisis? Postcolonial Africa and Post-Soviet Eurasia in Comparative Perspective (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2002)Google Scholar.

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5 This omits the unresolved status of the former Spanish colony of Western Sahara, whose annexation by Morocco remains contested by the Frente Popular para la Liberacion de Saguia el-Hamra y Rio de Oro (Polisario) in Algeria. Actual combat, however, ceased long ago.

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7 Influential early examples were Chazan, Naomi, An Anatomy of Ghanaian Politics: Managing Political Recession (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1982)Google Scholar; and Sandbrook, Richard and Barker, Jonathan, The Politics of Africa's Economic Stagnation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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12 See, for example, Ergas, Zaki, ed., The African State in Transition (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Young, Crawford, The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994)Google Scholar.

13 Recent examples include Kaufman, Stuart J., Modern Hatreds: The Symbolic Politics of Ethnic War (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001)Google Scholar; and Chirot, Daniel and Seligman, Martin E. P., eds., Ethnopolitical Warfare: Causes, Consequences, and Possible Solutions (Washington, D.C.: American chological Association, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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19 This gave rise to the influential thesis of World Bank official Paul Collier that greed, not grievance, drives African conflicts; see Collier, , “Doing Well Out of War: An Economic Perspective,” in Berdal, Mats and Malone, David, eds., Greed and Grievance: Economic Agenda in Civil Wars (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 2000)Google Scholar.

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31 For more detail, see Hall, Margaret and Young, Tom, Confronting Leviathan: Mozambique since Independence (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

22 Cherif Ouazani, “GIA: échec et mat,” Jeune Afrique 2145, February 18–24, 2002, 33–35. Zouabri, the sixth supreme commander of the GIA, had declared himself “national emir” in 1996, becoming by far the longest surviving nominal head of this loose-knit grouping. A former drug dealer of slender education and minimal theological knowledge, Zouabri had declared that any Algerian who failed to take up arms to install an Islamic republic was an apostate.

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