Wars do end! changing patterns of political violence in Sub-Saharan Africa

African Affairs

Volumn 111, Issue 443, 2012, Pages 179-201

  Straus, Scott ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN MADISON   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

CIVIL WAR; COLD WAR; ELECTORAL SYSTEM; GEOPOLITICS; PERIPHERAL REGION; POLITICAL VIOLENCE; STATE ROLE;

SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA;

EID: 84859647807     PISSN: 00019909     EISSN: 14682621     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/afraf/ads015     Document Type: Article

References (74)

1. Throughout the text and in the graphs I refer to 'sub-Saharan Africa' and 'Africa' interchangeably. Those states under discussion in the article are those south of the Sahara.
2. Robert Kaplan, The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the dreams of the post-Cold War (Random House, New York, NY, 2000). Note that the title page displays a map of Africa.
3. Jeffrey Gettleman, 'Africa's endless wars: why the continent's wars never end', Foreign Policy 178 (March/April 2010), pp. 73-5.
4. Paul Williams, War and Conflict in Africa (Polity Press, Cambridge, 2011), p. 4.
5. Williams explains the African focus of his insightful and perspicacious book, citing 'the sheer volume of armed conflicts' on the continent since the Cold War.
6. By civil wars I refer to armed conflict within an internationally recognized country between two or more belligerents in which one actor is the state.
7. Joshua Goldstein, Winning the War on War: The decline of armed conflict worldwide (Penguin Books, New York, NY, 2011).
8. Human Security Report Project, Human Security Report 2009/2010: The causes of peace and the shrinking costs of war (Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, 2010).
9. John Mueller, The Remnants of War (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 2004).
10. Williams, War and Conflict, p. 4.
11. Thomas Bassett, 'Winning coalition, sore loser: the 2010 presidential elections in Côte d'Ivoire', African Affairs 110, 440 (2011), pp. 457-68.
12. Again contra Gettleman who claims today's rebels have no ideology and no cause, many of these insurgents make strong ideological claims, such as Boko Haram, AQIM, Al-Shabab, Darfuri rebels, and the various separatist movements.
13. William Reno, Warfare in Independent Africa (Cambridge University Press, New York, NY, 2011).
14. To be sure, some insurgencies fight in large, weak, personalized states, as in Chad, the Central African Republic, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
15. These theories are discussed in more detail below.
16. The latter point is consistent with a major forthcoming study: Crawford Young, The Post-Colonial State in Africa: Fifty years of independence (University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI, forthcoming).
17. Nils Petter Gleditsch, Peter Wallensteen, Mikael Eriksson, Margareta Sollenberg, and Håvard Strand, 'Armed conflict 1946-2001: a new dataset', Journal of Peace Research 39, 5 (2002), pp. 615-37.
18. The data are available here: (25 January 2012). The dataset used in the analysis is v4_2009.
19. In the discussion and analysis, I treat any 'armed conflict' in the UCDP/PRIO Armed Conflict database as a war. (There is also a separate database on non-state armed conflict, which is discussed below.) I choose the lower threshold of 25 battle deaths per year (as opposed to 1,000 battle deaths per year) so as to be sensitive to the occurrence of both highand low-intensity wars.
20. Nicholas Sambanis, 'Using case studies to expand economic models of civil war', Perspectives on Politics 2, 2 (2004), pp. 259-79.
21. Paul Williams in War and Conflict (Chapter 1 in particular) persuasively shows the ways in which coding decisions and measurement error lead to inconsistent results. Nonetheless, despite these very real and important concerns, by using a well-respected and well-researched dataset such as the UCDP/PRIO one can provide a valid snapshot of trends over time.
22. These data exclude anti-colonial wars, which are coded as 'extra-systemic' wars in the UCDP/PRIO dataset. The baseline number of sub-Saharan African states in the quantitative analysis is 46, which excludes the Seychelles and São Tomé and Principe.
23. Several African states (such as Zimbabwe, Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, and Eritrea) achieved their independence after the early 1960s, whereas few states in Asia achieved independence in the comparable period (Bangladesh and East Timor). Thus, the number of years in which some African states could have had a war was less overall than in Asia, which is worth noting.
24. Dara Kay Cohen, Explaining Sexual Violence during Civil War (Stanford University, unpublished PhD thesis, 2010).
25. Williams, War and Conflict, pp. 4, 26.
26. One-sided killing connotes the idea that unarmed civilians or prisoners are targeted.
27. Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars: Organized violence in a global era (Stanford University Press, Palo Alto, CA, 1999).
28. For a challenge to that idea, see Stathis Kalyvas, '"New" and "old" wars: a valid distinction?', World Politics 54, 1 (2001), pp. 99-118.
29. Reno, Warfare in Independent Africa.
30. Gettleman, 'Africa's forever wars'.
31. Stathis Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War (Cambridge University Press, New York, NY, 2006).
32. Filip Reyntjens, The Great African War: Congo and regional geopolitics, 1996-2006 (Cambridge University Press, New York, NY, 2009).
33. The UCDP/PRIO data record high, low, and best estimates of battle deaths per war per year. Figure 4 reports the high estimates in the data.
34. The data are available at (25 January 2012).
35. The data used in this article are version 3.0.
36. See Bethany Lacina and Nils Petter Gleditsch, 'Monitoring trends in global combat: a new dataset of battle deaths', European Journal of Population 21, 2-3 (2005), pp. 145-66.
37. The data are on civil war, which is the dominant form of armed conflict on the continent. Yet the trends for interstate and internationalized civil war are similar.
38. Idean Salehyan, Rebels without Borders: Transnational insurgencies in world politics (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 2009).
39. Scott Straus, 'Second-generation comparative research on genocide', World Politics 59, 3 (2007), pp. 476-501.
40. Jay Ulfelder and Benjamin Valentino, 'Assessing the risks of statesponsored mass killing' (Political Instability Task Force, Washington, DC, 2008).
41. Ulfelder and Valentino, 'Assessing the risks'.
42. The data cover 2000-8.
43. The data are available here: http://www.pcr.uu.se/research/ucdp/datasets/ucdp_non-state_conflict_dataset_/ (25 January 2012).
44. Williams, War and Conflict, p. 23.
45. Williams produces a very readable appendix of the conflicts in Africa.
46. See War and Conflict, pp. 235-42.
47. Catherine Boone, 'Electoral populism where property rights are weak: land politics in contemporary sub-Saharan Africa', Comparative Politics 41, 2 (2009), pp. 183-201.
48. Susanne Mueller, 'The political economy of Kenya's crisis', Journal of Eastern African Studies 2, 2 (2008), pp. 185-210.
49. Thomas Bassett, 'The political ecology of peasant-herder conflicts in northern Ivory Coast', Annals of the Association of American Geographers 78, 3 (1988), pp. 453-72.
50. Matthew Turner, 'Political ecology and the moral dimensions of "resource conflicts": the case of farmer-herder conflicts in the Sahel', Political Geography 23, 7 (2004), pp. 863-89.
51. Charlie Taylor is an advanced graduate student in the Department of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Leonardo Arriola, at the University of California, Berkeley, is also working on a dataset of electoral violence in Africa.
52. Scott Straus and Charlie Taylor, 'Democratization and electoral violence in sub-Saharan Africa, 1990-2008' in Dorina Bekoe (ed.), Electoral Violence in Sub-Saharan Africa (United States Institute of Peace, Washington, DC, forthcoming).
53. For a good review of the literature, see Mark Moritz, 'Understanding farmer-herder conflicts in west Africa: outline of a processual approach', Human Organization 69, 2 (2010), pp. 138-48.
54. The data are here: (25 January 2012).
55. Morten Boas, '"New" nationalism and autochthony: tales of origin as political cleavage', Africa Spectrum 44, 1 (2009), pp. 19-38.
56. James Fearon and David Laitin, 'Sons of the soil, migrants, and civil war', World Development 39, 2 (2011), pp. 199-211.
57. Four African civil wars in their dataset are 'sons of the soil' conflicts - Mali (Tuareg rebellion), Senegal (Casamance), and Sudan (Darfur). They also include the anti-colonial war in Zimbabwe, though anti-colonial wars are not the focus of the discussion in this article.
58. On weak states and rough terrain, see James Fearon and David Laitin, 'Ethnicity, insurgency, and civil war', American Political Science Review 97, 1 (2003), pp. 75-90.
59. On economic endowments, see Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler, 'Greed and grievance in civil war', Oxford Economic Papers 56, 4 (2004), pp. 563-95.
60. On horizontal inequalities, see Lars-Erik Cederman, Nils Weidmann, and Kristian Skrede Gleditsch, 'Horizontal inequalities and ethnonationalist civil war: a global comparison', American Political Science Review 105, 3 (2011), pp. 478-95.
61. Frances Stewart (ed.), Horizontal Inequalities and Conflict: Understanding group violence in multiethnic societies (Palgrave MacMillan, New York, NY, 2008).
62. Stathis Kalyvas and Laia Balcells, 'International system and technologies of rebellion: how the end of the Cold War shaped internal conflict', American Political Science Review 104, 3 (2010), pp. 415-29.
63. On China's foreign policy in Africa as it relates to coups and political violence, see Jonathan Holslag, 'China and the coups: coping with political instability in Africa', African Affairs 110, 40 (2010), pp. 367-86.
64. This is a point emphasized in Goldstein, Winning the War and Human Security, Human Security Report.
65. See also Jon Western and Joshua Goldstein, 'Humanitarian intervention comes of age', Foreign Affairs 90, 6 (2011), pp. 60-73.
66. The data are from official UN peacekeeping statistics, found at and (25 January 2012). The data include military personnel but exclude police and civilian staff.
67. Séverine Autesserre, The Trouble with the Congo: Local violence and the failure of international peacebuilding (Cambridge University Press, New York, NY, 2010).
68. Michael Barnett and Martha Finnemore, Rules for the World: International organizations in global politics (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 2004).
69. Virginia Page Fortna, Does Peacekeeping Work? Shaping belligerents' choices after civil war (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2008).
70. Lise Howard, UN Peacekeeping in Civil Wars (Cambridge University Press, New York, NY, 2009).
71. Alex Bellamy and Paul Williams, 'The new politics of protection? Côte d'Ivoire, Libya, and the responsibility to protect', International Affairs 87, 4 (2011), pp. 845-70.
72. Thomas Bassett and Scott Straus, 'Defending democracy in Côte d'Ivoire: Africa takes a stand', Foreign Affairs 90, 4 (2011), pp. 130-40.
73. Victor Peskin, International Justice in Rwanda and the Balkans: Virtual trials and state cooperation (Cambridge University Press, New York, NY, 2008).
74. Indeed, as the article went to press, a new and significant Tuareg offensive began in northern Mali. Equipped with heavy weapons from Muammar Gaddafi's fallen regime in Libya and commanded by a former colonel from Libya's army, the insurgents successfully fought against Malian troops and captured territory in the north during the first weeks of fighting. What will happen remains unclear, and the case may diverge from the trends described in the article, even if to date the fighting has been confined to the far north. The timing and initial success of the insurgents is consistent with the theoretical claim in the article that external, non-domestic changes (in this case regional) affect the dynamics of internal armed conflict.