The landscape of violence in Africa is as varied as the continent’s physical topography.
Scott Straus, professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, brought this message to vlog during the second annual Schaehrer Lecture, sponsored by the Peace and Conflict Studies Program on Thursday.
Popular conceptions of Africa as a place of widespread hostility and instability are not necessarily corroborated in the data collected by Straus, who has authored award-winning books like The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda.
“Africa is not uniquely prone to violence and war,” he said. If scholars look at the numbers, a different picture emerges.
During the Cold War, large-scale conflicts between African nation states using professional armies in pitched battle were the norm. After the fall of communism, for reasons scholars still need to explore, a tide of smaller civil and cross-border conflicts, carried out mainly by untrained insurgents, rose to replace conventional warfare.
These actions are currently taking place in three sub-Saharan zones, stretching from Mali in the west to Somalia in the east. While civil wars typically have a more significant impact on the civilian population and news reports from Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo reflect a staggering loss of life, statistics show that the duration and relative violence of African conflicts are not as historically great as those found in Asia.
Elsewhere, to the far north and south of Africa, stable governments prevail — sometimes against enormous odds created by ethnic tension, vast territories, and limited resources. As these states develop a history of solid statecraft, they’re also producing elder statesmen who have the gravitas and experience to mediate internal conflicts in places like Kenya or Cote d’Ivoire.
In Straus’s opinion, this is the Africa of today and tomorrow. Wars will decrease; electoral and political violence will persist; most notably, insurgents will continue to take hostages in Mali and territory in Congo.
Why is it harder to bring these conflicts to a close? “Because we don’t know what they want,” said Straus. Once you determine the demands of any particular guerrilla group, it will fragment and agreements that have been made will not be acknowledged by new splinter organizations.
“War isn’t over,” Straus concluded, “but it’s changing.”
The Schaehrer Memorial Lectures were established in 2009 by fellow alumni of Peter Schaehrer ’65 who was a career educator and champion of civil rights.