Reid, Richard

English

SOAS Research Online

William Reno. Warfare in Independent Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. xxii +271 pp. $85.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-521-85045-2; $27.99 (paper), ISBN 978-0-521-61552-5.Paul Williams. War and Conflict in Africa. Cambridge: Polity, 2011. xii + 306 pp. $69.95 (cloth), ISBN978-0-7456-4544-5; $24.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-7456-4545-2.Reviewed by Richard Reid (SOAS)Published on H-Africa (January, 2012)Commissioned by Brett L. ShadleThe End of the Beginning: New Syntheses on Modern War in AfricaIt seems safe to suggest that scholarship on mod-ern African warfare has come of age. The field hascertainly witnessed remarkable growth over the lasttwenty years, and especially over the last decade, aseven a truncated survey of the literature suggests: aswarfare has proliferated, so too have the researchersseeking to understand them. There have been stud-ies of guerrilla movements of various hues, and of arange of “peripheral” armed groups locked in conflictwith one another or with adjacent states; of warlordsand local insurgency; of proxy war and transnationalcomplexes of violence. Particular regions have at-tracted much of the attention: in West Africa, PaulRichards’s Fighting for the Rainforest (1996) andDavid Keen’s Conflict and Collusion in Sierra Leone(2005) both dealt with Sierra Leone’s self-destructionfrom the late 1980s onward, while Stephen Ellis’s TheMask of Anarchy (1999, 2007) similarly sought tocomprehend the catastrophe which had unfolded inLiberia. William Reno–one of the authors under re-view here–examined the (largely) West African phe-nomenon of the “warlord” in Warlord Politics andAfrican States (1998), although his study also encom-passed the Democratic Republic of Congo, anotherkey focus of research in recent years. Several bookshave appeared on this historically violent entity sinceGeorges Nzongola-Ntalaja’s The Congo from Leopoldto Kabila (2002), including Gerard Prunier’s FromGenocide to Continental War (2009), Filip Reynt-jens’s The Great African War (2009), and more re-cently Jason Stearns’s Dancing in the Glory of Mon-sters (2011). If Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Congohave been vortices of research, so too has northeastAfrica, a region with more than its fair share of vi-olent conflict in recent years–including guerrilla in-surgencies, wars of secession, and arguably the mostdramatic instance in Africa of the otherwise rare spec-tacle of full-scale interstate war, that between Eritreaand Ethiopia. Katsuyoshi Fukui and John Markakis’sEthnicity and Conflict in the Horn of Africa (1994)remains an important reference point, as does Si-mon Simonse and Eisei Kurimoto’s Conflict, Age andPower in North East Africa (1998). The number ofcase-specific studies is too great to allow anything likea full list here, but relevant examples include DouglasJohnson’s The Root Causes of Sudan’s Civil Wars(2003, 2011), Kjetil Tronvoll’s War and the Politicsof Identity in Ethiopia (2009), Gebru Tareke’s TheEthiopian Revolution (2009), and the reviewer’s ownFrontiers of Violence in Northeast Africa (2011).In the meantime, a number of important col-lections of essays appeared, indicating significantprogress toward overarching analyses and broadtrends linking apparently disparate case studies.Perhaps seminal among these was ChristopherClapham’s African Guerrillas (1998); a later vol-ume, edited by Morten Boas and Kevin C. Dunnand also titled African Guerrillas (2007), showcasedthe latest research on subject matter which was be-ing handled with increasing confidence by politi-cal scientists, anthropologists, and economists. Thelist of such collections has lengthened indeed: T.M. Ali and R. O. Matthews’s Civil Wars in Africa(1999); Paul Richards’s No Peace, No War (2005);Patrick Chabal, Ulf Engel, and Anna-Maria Gen-tili’s Is Violence Inevitable in Africa? (2005); PrebenKaarsholm’s Violence, Political Culture and Devel-opment in Africa (2006); Bill Derman, Rie Odgaard,1H-Net Reviewsand Espen Sjaastad’s Conflicts Over Land and Waterin Africa (2007); and a pair of volumes edited by Al-fred Nhema and Paul Tiyambe Zeleza under the aus-pices of the Organisation for Social Science Researchin Eastern and Southern Africa, The Roots of AfricanConflicts (2008) and The Resolution of African Con-flicts (2008). Bold theses seeking to makes sense of,and indeed rationalize, the bewilderingly violent andthe impossibly complex have been set out by Christo-pher Cramer in his Civil War Is Not a Stupid Thing(2006) and–dealing with war among other modern“crises”–in Robert Bates’s When Things Fell Apart(2008), and by Paul Collier in The Bottom Billion(2008).In other words, students of modern war have beensubjected to a veritable bombardment, and at timesit has been difficult to keep up. For that reason alone,the two books under review here are indeed welcomeadditions, because they represent the significant ad-vances made in our understanding of contemporaryconflict in Africa, as well as imposing analytical or-der on a dizzying array of case studies and mate-rial. They cover much of the same ground, althoughReno’s narrative begins with the anticolonial violenceof the 1950s and 1960s, while Williams is concernedwith the post-Cold War world. Williams prefers tothink in terms of“ingredients”–by which is meant spe-cific issues which need to be identified as contributingto conflict situations–while Reno espies instead typesof “rebels,” and seeks to explain how these evolve ateach particular stage of Africa’s modern history.Williams’s text opens with a section dealing with“contexts”–which essentially deals with the typologyof warfare under consideration, and the chief politi-cal and social characteristics of conflict–and ends withone on “responses,” concerned with international (es-pecially African) peacekeeping initiatives and oper-ations, power-sharing, and peace deals. These arecertainly useable overviews, especially the latter sec-tion which marshals a great deal of data on thepeace industry. But the main body of the bookis to be found in the middle section, which ex-amines “ingredients.” There is nothing controver-sial about the explanatory factors laid before thereader; these represent, by now, well-established in-terpretations. Thus we have “neo-patrimonialism,”“resources,”“sovereignty,”“ethnicity,” and “religion”–which pretty much covers everything one might ex-pect. Reno’s introductory overview is perhaps a morestimulating assessment of Africa’s “evolving warfare,”highlighting the “changing fields of leverage” concept(essentially shifting circumstances both locally andglobally) which serves Reno’s purpose very effectivelyin later chapters. These “changing fields of leverage”are what give modern African wars their particularflavor, although Reno concedes, somewhat perfunc-torily, that deep-rooted, precolonial influences maybe important–more on which later. He identifies fivecategories of rebels. “Anti-colonial” rebels waged waragainst recalcitrant regimes in the last years of colo-nial rule. “Majority-rule” rebels–associated most ob-viously with southern Africa–fought against settlerminorities in South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Namibia.“Reform” rebels emerged in the 1980s, well versed inthe trials and tribulations of their forebears but nowrecognizing that mere independence was not enoughand that the state itself needed to be transformed.“Warlord” rebels developed around those seeking todestabilize regimes whose patronage networks wereseen to have outlived their usefulness, while warlordsthemselves tapped into wider pools of marginaliza-tion. And“parochial”rebels were those who eschewedlarge-scale warlord activities to form local defenseforces and militias with essentially local concerns(Nigeria is the most cited instance) amid wider po-litical and social breakdown. In essence, while Renoforegrounds the practitioners of violence themselves,Williams does the same with the “issues” with whichthese “rebels” grapple.Perhaps inevitably, there are omissions and sac-rifices. In neither book is there much treatment ofthe cultures of militarism that so often sustain suchmovements, and which have such a profound influ-ence on both the domestic and the foreign policiesof those movements which actually succeed in seiz-ing political power–although Williams’s discussion ofreligion and ethnicity allows for some discussion ofinternal cultures. Gender is largely absent. Warfareis rarely glimpsed in terms of the contours of socialor economic change over the longer term, nor is itclear whether such patterns of change drive war, orare in turn driven by violence. The political and so-cial creativity which so often attends warfare remainsan elephant in the room.More specifically, one might take issue withReno’s system of distinguishing one group of armedmen from another; there is in fact considerable over-lap between the various categories utilized here. Itis also surely highly debatable whether “most rebelsfight to take control of states” (p. 3): many do not,but rather fight to create political, social, and indeedcultural spaces for themselves on the frontiers of ag-2H-Net Reviewsgressive or disinterested state systems, or at most towin a stake in those systems. Reno’s discussion of therole of education (or the lack of it) is potentially stim-ulating, but here it reads somewhat digressively, andthis reviewer longed for an enlargement of the thesis.In the sphere of economics, meanwhile, Williams ar-gues forcefully that resources are means rather thanends, but I am not quite sure, ultimately, what ismeant by this: when large numbers of people aredenied access to the benefits associated with factorendowments, then resources are indeed “ends,” whilethe notion of “greed” (or at least material aspiration)is curiously removed from the equation. Moreover,Williams’s claim, reiterating that of Paul TiyambeZeleza, that there is really nothing exceptional aboutAfrica’s wars may be true in the most general sense–that is to say, from a certain vantage point manyconflicts do indeed look much the same. But deeperhistorical analysis suggests otherwise, in fact, and in-dicates that there are indeed a number of distinc-tive threads running through African violence overthe longer term, a perspective denied by the narrowtimeframe deployed here.Historians–at least precolonial ones–can be suchirritating colleagues. They raise hackles with theirconstant carping on the need to go further back, andare holier-than-thou about the failure of everyone elseto contextualize temporally as well as spatially. Thisreviewer is already getting a reputation in this re-gard. But a couple of observations are worth making.The first relates to the problem of arbitrary startingpoints. In the case of Williams’s book, beginning in1990 echoes the post-Cold War puzzle for many in theWest: namely, why so much violence in Africa whenthe world’s great ideological struggle was won? Thetruth is that while there are certain elements whichare distinctive to the post-Cold War era (presumablywe are still in it, though this is far from clear), theroots of many of the wars–and certainly many of theconditions facilitating them–described in Williams’sbook are to be found long before 1990. In fairnessthe same can be said of some of Reno’s cases. Ofcourse, we can only take this so far: we have to startsomewhere, after all. But the problem with such con-ventional chronological markers–the end of colonialrule, or the end of the Cold War–is that they tendto conceal some of the most important longer-termcontours of African warfare, and bind discussions tosuperficial “turning points.”Moreover, it is an understandable but perhapsoverdone ambition that texts such as these will beread by that most prized of audiences beyond theacademy, comprising the policymaker, the militarystrategist, and the humanitarian worker. This is in-deed an important audience for modern Africanists,but it is also stubbornly presentist in its outlook, dis-interested, ultimately, in deep roots and long terms,for these take time to grasp and–it is believed–serveno practical purpose. One result is the absence ofhistorical depth from much of the debate; another isthe received wisdom that war is “bad” and must be“resolved,” which is unquestionably well meant butwhich comes at the expense of truly understandinghow–and when–wars begin. In sum, not enough ofthe work being done on African warfare has been un-dertaken by historians, particularly those willing tomake links between modern and precolonial phenom-ena. At the present time, history lags behind anthro-pology, political science, and development studies inthis vital and energetic field.None of this is really a criticism of the booksunder review themselves, however; the final pointof this piece must be that both Paul Williams andWilliam Reno have done what they set out to do,and have done so exceptionally well. The strengthsof the Williams text are its synthesis of an enormousamount of material, its encyclopaedic nature, andits careful thematic structure. It contains a num-ber of extremely helpful appendices, graphs, and in-serts throughout, presenting data in a lucid and il-luminating manner. Reno’s book is attractively andaccessibly written, with a compelling analytical struc-ture, even if one might quibble about categoriza-tions and characterizations. It is rich in military de-tail as well as providing the political contexts withinwhich these conflicts unfolded. It is a fine summationof complex events and dynamics. These two booksare admirably researched and eloquent texts whichwill deservedly be read by students, fellow scholars,and–yes–those policymakers who wish to end Africa’sbloody present, and who seek swift but stimulatingsummaries of the key themes and processes. And so,to steal from Winston Churchill, these books do notrepresent the end, or even the beginning of the end;but they do signify, in terms of our understanding ofconflict in Africa’s recent past, the end of the begin-ning. It is the hope of this reviewer that historicalreach will now begin to lengthen, that scholars of thedeep past will join the debate, and that policy folkmight just continue to listen.3H-Net ReviewsIf there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the list discussion logs at:http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl.Citation: Richard Reid. Review of Reno, William, Warfare in Independent Africa and Williams, Paul,War and Conflict in Africa. H-Africa, H-Net Reviews. January, 2012.URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=34023This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.4

The End of the Beginning: new syntheses on modern war in Africa

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