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Week Seven Notes: Political Economy of War
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Reading notes
Reading 1: Conflict, War and State Fragility
SOURCE: T.J. Moss and D. Resnick, ch. 5 “Conflict, War and State Fragility” in African Development:
Making Sense of Issues and Actors, Rienner (2017) pp. 77-93.
SUMMARY: 15 pages - 7 pages
Conflict, War and State Fragility
● Many African countries have suffered from violent conflict, which is often identified as one of
the main reasons for their poor development performance.
● However, armed conflict also contributed to the decolonization of some countries, such as
Zimbabwe, Namibia, and Mozambique.
● Despite frequent outbreaks of conflict post-independence, painting Africa as a continent
consumed by war is false; as half of the countries on the continent have no contemporary violent
outbreaks, for example, Zambia, Botswana, and Malawi.
● In other countries, violent conflict has only occurred in certain pockets, for example, in Ghana,
Burkina Faso, and Niger.
● Lastly, recovery paths have also been diverse, countries such as Uganda, Rwanda, and
Mozambique have had durable recovery, yet the Central African Republic, the DRC, and
Somalia, for example, continue to experience conflict.
Spectrum of Violence
Africa has experienced the full spectrum of organized violence.
Classic interstate war (relatively rare)
● Tanzania invaded Uganda in 1979.
● South Africa incursions into Angola 1980s
● Ethiopian-Eritrean border war of 1998
● Rwandan military’s invasion of Zaire 1997 to help overthrow the government and the intermittent
tensions between Niger.
Most conflict in Africa has been internal wars
Full-scale civil wars:
● Angola
● Côte d'Ivoire
● Biafran secessionist war in Nigeria
Conflicts of lower-level, slow-boil violence, often perpetuated by an insurgency:
● Mozambique’s conflict with Renamo in the 1980s
● Uganda’s long-running struggle against the Lord's Resistance Army.
State-sponsored violence against civilians:
● Burundi
● Cameroon’s anglophone region
● Often targeted at those protesting for political and social freedoms rather than for outright control
of the state.
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Small, largely contained outbursts of violence
From simmering tensions that have not directly involved the state security forces (except to intercede)
● Northern Ghana in the 1990s
● Occasional battles between pastoralists and farmers in places such as Nigeria and Kenya
● For the most part, African civil conflicts involve light arms, excl. Angolan civil war which
featured modern fighter jets and set-piece tank battles, and the rise of Islamic insurgency in west
and East Africa accompanied by the use of suicide bombings, especially in areas of high
population density such as markets and restaurants.
● In Africa as well, the number of African civil wars, defined as at least 1,000 people killed per
year in a conflict where the government is one of the warring parties, has declined since the
1990s.
Contemporary Conflicts
Interstate wars (between two or more sovereign states over territory)
● Are relatively rare in Africa with the exception of Ethiopia and Eritrea.
○ Initially, these two were close allies as the ruling parties fought together to take down
Mengistu Haile Mariam Marxist regime in 1991.
○ Two years later, Eritrea became independent with the blessing of Ethiopia.
○ Tensions increased as political and economic rivalry began
○ Breaking point: Eritrea moved troops into the border area around Badme, an area with no
economic or strategic value yet Ethiopia responded to the provocation whereby a
full-scale war broke out, 70,000 lives lost.
Internal wars → Became internationalized by attracting regional participation.
Here are three of the most extreme:
1. Central Africa/DRC, sometimes called Africa's World War
● Mainly fought in the eastern parts of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but at
various moments involved at least 7 countries and dozens of various militias.
● Initiated by civil war in Rwanda in 1994, when the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF)
chased the genocidal Interahamwe militia into then ‘Zaire’.
● Once RPF gained control of Rwanda and then saw Zaire’s Mobutu as protecting the
Interahamwe, they launched an invasion backed by Uganda and various COngolese
factions opposed to Mobutu.
● At this point Mobutu was weak and increasingly isolated which made it easy for the
Rwandan backed rebels to depose him in 1997.
● Rwanda set up a buffer zone along the border and continued to pursue the Interahamwe.
● Rwanda fell out with the new Congolese president, Laurent Kabila, and relaunched the
war in 1998
● Kabila was able to get help from Angola, Namibia, and Zimbabwe which sent troops and
halted the Rwandan and rebel advance.
● Stalemate with the country carved up among multiple foreign armies and factions.
● Rwanda and Uganda began to attack each other inside the DRC, presumably fighting
over spoils.
● In 2002 the peace process got under way, allowing for the gradual withdrawal of the
foreign armies and attempts to build a sustainable political system in the DRC.
● Up to 6 million people are estimated to have died overall in this conflict, mostly
Congolese civilians.
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2. West Africa/Mano River Basin
● In Central Africa, a series of local conflicts spilled over into a larger struggle when sides
supported factions beyond borders in search of an advantage at home and retaliation for
the support of the other.
● Liberia broke out into civil war in 1989 after Charles Taylor and his Libyan-trained rebels
invaded the country from Cote d'Ivoire
● As Taylor captured territory and eventually power in an election in 1991, he expanded his
influence by supporting rebels in Sierra Leone, especially Foday Sankoh’s Revolutionary
United Front (RUF), which gained control of Sierra Leone’s diamond fields and earned a
reputation for brutality.
● Taylor helped to launch an insurgency in Guinea after accusing it of supporting another
Liberian rebel group. Meanwhile, in 2002, rebel groups from Guinea and Liberia moved
into Cote d'Ivoire, helping to plunge that country into civil war.
● British intervention in Sierra Leone in 2003 stabilized that country, while Taylor's exile
helped to allow a new round of elections in late 2005, which brought Ellen Johnson
Sirleaf to power. Sierra Leone and Liberia both have since made great progress on
security sector reform and other steps toward recovery.
3. The Horn of Africa/East Africa
● The internal conflicts across East Africa have become intertwined, as countries tended to
interfere with their neighbors and have little control over their own borders
● The collapse of Somalia in 1991 is perhaps the most extreme illustration of spillover,
with armed Somali groups making regular incursions into Kenya and eastern Ethiopia.
● Ethiopian troops pursued rebels across the “border” into Somalia and, at various times,
provided arms and support to Somali factions as proxy fighters.
● The war in Sudan from the 1980s through the mid-2000s also provided an opportunity for
mutual exchange of rebel support, with Sudan aiding anti-government groups in Uganda,
Chad, and Ethiopia, while Uganda, Chad, and Ethiopia gave aid to Sudanese rebels.
Civil wars and low-level armed insurgencies
The most prevalent types of conflict in Africa are civil wars and low-level armed insurgencies.
Among the most notable ongoing or recent such conflicts are:
1. South Sudan
● Early on in South Sudan's existence as a new country in 2011, there was already fighting
between two rebel groups.
● Escalated in 2013 as two factions within the Presidential Guard split their allegiances
between the sitting president, Salva Kiir, and his vice president, Riek Machar. The latter
had been ousted from government earlier in the year
● The political ambitions of the two men are the primary source of the conflict, however
there were ethnic dimensions as Kiir belongs to the Dinka group and Machar to the Nuer.
2. Central African Republic.
● Exiled President Bozizé was overthrown in 2013 after ten corrupt years in office. The
violent coup was led by rebels known as Séléka (Alliance), who are predominantly
Muslim.
● Their two grievances against Bozizé were his abandonment of a previous peace accord
and accusations of ethnic favoritism.
● After the coup, Christian vigilante groups known as anti-balaka (or “machete-proof”)
retaliated and engaged in ethnic cleansing of Muslims in some parts of the country. It
