Civil War
The prevalence and persistence of large-scale conflict has been one of the most significant obstacles to political and economic development in post-colonial Africa. Since 1956, when Sudan became one of the first sub-Saharan African countries to obtain its independence, more than one-third of the world’s civil wars have been in Africa, directly affecting one out of every two countries in the region.1 The average civil war endures for more than eight years, killing thousands,2 displacing tens of thousands, reducing economic growth, stifling democracy, and spreading conflict into neighbouring countries. Moreover, these conditions often trap countries in a cycle of violence that is difficult to break. Half of the war-affected countries have experienced two or more civil wars.
What explains this deadly phenomenon? Over the last 15 years a robust research programme has emerged to study the onset, duration, and termination of civil war. Global in scope, but with particular relevance to Africa, a first wave of civil war scholarship emphasized the structural determinants of large-scale political violence. A series of studies found that populous, low-income countries, with weak states and rough terrain, and war-affected neighbours are most vulnerable to civil war (Collier and Hoeffler 2004; Fearon and Laitin 2003; Hegre and Sambanis 2006; Salehyan 2007). These conditions, the authors conclude, foment civil war by increasing the ‘feasibility’ of insurgency (Collier et al. 2009) while hamstringing the government’s counter-insurgency capabilities (Fearon and Laitin 2003: 75). As war further erodes state capacity and undermines economic development, many of these countries become caught in a ‘conflict trap’ (Collier 2007).
While this first wave of scholarship has advanced our understanding of global variation in civil war risk (e.g. why Chad is more likely to experience civil war than Qatar), it tells us less about why and how civil war occurs – that is, the dynamic process by which bargaining over power and wealth ends in large-scale violence. To understand this part of the puzzle we must shift our focus from underlying structural determinants to the politics of civil war. Remarkably, in the vast civil war literature, this critical dimension has been understudied. This chapter helps to address this gap in the civil war research programme, while advancing a new analytical perspective on some of Africa’s most devastating conflicts.
The chapter makes two broad points. First, it argues that civil war risk in sub-Saharan Africa is mediated by political alliances or networks, especially the institution of ethnic accommodation.3 While low income and state weakness increase the likelihood of large-scale political violence, these factors are not deterministic. Rulers can still secure social peace by striking bargains with members of other ethnic groups and maintaining ethnically inclusive regimes.4 This is the predominant strategy that African rulers have followed (Rothchild 1997). According to data from the Ethnic Power Relations dataset,5 in any given year 55–60 per cent of politically relevant ethnic groups are included in the central government.6 At the same time, however, this suggests that exclusion along ethnic lines has been a regular feature of politics in many African countries (Lynch, this volume), leaving the central government more vulnerable to societal rebellion.
The second section of the chapter seeks to explain ethnic exclusion. After reviewing more familiar theses about the effects of colonialism and resource scarcity, I suggest an alternative logic that posits that ethnic exclusion is a function of strategic uncertainty – in particular the difficulties of sharing power in the shadow of the coup d’état. Ethnic exclusion reduces this uncertainty but at the cost of increasing the risk of civil war.
Securing Social Peace in Weak States
Over the last decade a consensus has emerged in the civil war literature that the outbreak of large-scale political violence is most likely in poor countries with large populations, incongruent authority structures, and neighbours at war (Hegre et al. 2001; Collier and Hoeffler 2004; Salehyan 2007). These factors are posited to increase civil war risk by contributing to ‘weak states’ that lack the capacity to police and control their peripheries, thus increasing the feasibility of rebellion while undermining the government’s counter-insurgency capabilities. The ‘weak state’ hypothesis has attracted a great deal of interest in the civil war literature as scholars have sought to unpack what some have described as a nebulous analytical framework (Kocher 2010) and better to specify how different dimensions of state capacity affect civil war risk (Hendrix 2010).
Within this growing literature, studies have tended to focus on the importance of formal institutions – such as government bureaucracy and the military – as key pillars of state capacity and therefore civil peace (Fearon and Laitin 2003; Hendrix 2010). Less attention within the civil war research programme, however, has been paid to the informal institutions – namely neopatrimonialism, or clientelism – that rulers in weak states employ to supplant and often subvert an autonomous bureaucracy and military.7 While these informal institutions are deleterious for state-building and economic development over the long run (Reno 1998; van de Walle 2001), they are the principal mechanisms by which regimes in weak states exert control over society in the short run (Lemarchand 1972; Rothchild and Foley 1988). Unable to rely on their bureaucracies, the ruling elite leans on its brokerage networks to help extract taxes, distribute state resources, address local grievances and demands, and manage dissent. Accordingly, in weak states we would expect state control and civil war to be mediated by the institutions of elite accommodation and ethnic brokerage (Snyder 1998). As Englebert and Ron (2004: 76–77) conclude in a case study of Congo-Brazzaville, ‘Neopatrimonialism can promote either political stability or violent conflict, depending on its level of inclusiveness’.
One empirical regularity consistent with this idea is that African rulers almost never face civil wars from their co-ethnics (see Roessler 2011). This correlation could be a function of sub-national variation in state capacity, particularly if the ruler’s ethnic group ‘inherited’ the state at independence (and benefited from skewed state development during the colonial period). However, what is striking is that it holds even for rulers and groups who historically were marginalized and come from the poorest and weakest states, wherein we would expect the central government’s bureaucratic quality and military capacity to be extremely low.
I posit that the institutions of elite accommodation and ethnic brokerage account for the absence of intra-ethnic rebellions. Substantial qualitative and quantitative evidence suggests that rulers tend to have stronger political ties and networks with their co-ethnics, especially from their home area, than with members of other ethnic groups. Three prominent examples are the regimes of Juvenal Habyarimana of Rwanda (Prunier 1995), Samuel Doe in Liberia (Berkeley 2001), and Mwai Kibaki in Kenya (Wrong 2010). These ties are not limited to elite circles; there is evidence that they also extend to the local level. Kasara (2007) finds that African rulers tend to impose higher taxes on agricultural crops grown in their home areas than those located in other parts of the country. She attributes this to the information advantages that rulers derive from having strong brokerage networks in their homelands. Franck and Rainer (2012) note the reciprocal nature of these exchanges. While co-ethnics may endure higher taxes, they also benefit from better health and education services. Overall, then, networks of exchange between rulers and their co-ethnics facilitate the more efficient extraction and allocation of resources, which should reduce the underlying grievances that fuel rebellion while equipping the government with the tools necessary to prevent or contain it effectively.
Additional evidence suggests that the pacifying effects of elite accommodation and brokerage networks are not limited to within the ruler’s ethnic group but can extend across society. Englebert and Ron (2004) attribute the end of the 1997 civil war in Congo-Brazzaville to the ‘patrimonial peace’ Denis Sassou-Nguesso secured by co-opting elites from various ethno-regional militias into the government and public sector. Across sub-Saharan Africa, a systematic relationship between ethnic inclusion and stability appears to exist. Controlling for a country’s income level and population size, groups included in the central government at the junior partner level or above are significantly less likely to start a civil war than excluded groups (see Roessler 2011). This suggests that even in the face of unfavourable structural conditions, rulers are able to avoid large-scale political violence through the institution of ethnic accommodation, or political alliances with members of other ethnic groups.
The Economic Logic of Ethnic Exclusion
Consistent with earlier waves of scholarship on neopatrimonialism, especially that of Donald Rothchild (see Rothchild 1997; Rothchild and Foley 1988; Lemarchand 1972), systematic evidence from across the region suggests that African rulers have employed ethnic accommodation to help resolve the ‘strong societies, weak states’ problem (Migdal 1988) that they faced in the post-independence period. Such ‘ethnic federations’ (Azam 2001) have served as the modal regime type. Nonetheless, exclusion along ethnic lines has remained a regular feature of African politics. In fact, in any given year between 1966 and 2005, 40–45 per cent of politically relevant ethnic groups have been excluded from the central government. Given the associated costs with ethnic exclusion, such as weaker political control and increased risk of group rebellion, this section seeks to account for the phenomenon of ethnic exclusion and outlines a set of possible factors that increase the likelihood of exclusion along ethnic lines.
Colonial Legacies
Of the 128 ethno-regional groups to experience some exclusion from the central government between 1955 and 2005, 47 of these groups (36 per cent) were excluded at the time of independence. For most of these groups, we can trace political marginalization to colonial government policies, in particular the uneven recruitment patterns used to fill positions in colonial institutions, including schools, bureaucracy, and the military. Though European administrators favoured the use of indirect rule and local intermediaries to control the indigenous majority and undermine nationalist sentiments, as the colony grew they lacked the foreign capacity to administer key institutions and had to rely more heavily on locals. Given the locus of colonial activity in the capital and the geographic concentration of ethnicity, however, not all groups benefitted equally from educational, employment, and business opportunities provided by the colonial government (Horowitz 1985). Consequently, those ethnic groups with homelands in close proximity to the capital were more likely to emerge from colonialism better educated, wealthier, and more active in nationalist movements, and thus better positioned to inherit the state at independence. On the other hand, many from the hinterland, such as the Somalis in Kenya, Highlanders in Madagascar, Southerners and Darfurians in Sudan, Northerners in Chad, Kabre in Togo, and Tuaregs in Niger and Mali, found themselves on the outside looking in at the inaugural governments.
The regional inequalities produced by colonialism have had lasting effects on ethnic political configurations. For example, the ethno-regional groups that were excluded from the central government at independence remained excluded for the next 30 years, on average. Some 45 per cent of these groups became involved in a large-scale rebellion during the post-colonial period. Prominent examples include Southerners in Sudan, Arabs and Muslim Sahel Groups in Chad, Zulu and Xhosa in South Africa, and Africans in Zimbabwe.8
While colonialism has had a decisive effect on post-colonial ethnic accommodation and civil war, there are clear limitations of its explanatory power. First, while colonial policies disproportionately benefited some groups, there was nothing deterministic about the power imbalances to emerge from colonialism. Whether these were remedied or not rested in the hands of post-colonial governments. Second, almost two-thirds of the incidents of ethnic exclusion began after independence, and are thus cases in which groups are represented in the central government in one year but then are purged or barred in the next. To account for both the prevalence and onset of ethnic exclusion, we need a more dynamic theory that specifies the incentives and constraints rulers face as they bargain with their co-ethnics, other power holders, and members of excluded groups. We now turn to the ways in which economic and strategic factors may structure ethnic bargaining and political configurations.
Wealth Accumulation
One of the defining features of Africa’s political economy is that the state often has been the primary means of accumulating wealth (Joseph 1987). Inheriting statist economies developed under colonialism, African rulers leveraged them as a means to build and maintain power. Rulers manipulated their economies in order to generate economic rents that they then disbursed for political purposes (Boone 1992). This system of political rule, which scholars refer to as neopatrimonialism (Erdmann, this volume), helped rulers of weak states to consolidate their personal power but at the cost of retarding long-run economic production and development (van de Walle 2001) and undermining inclusive, stable states. To maximize their economic rents, ruling elites have an incentive to limit the number of groups and powerbrokers with access to the central government.
Why, though, do ruling coalitions form along ethnic lines rather than based on ideology or party affiliation? Fearon (1999) suggests that ethnicity’s ascriptive quality, in which it cannot be easily chosen or changed by individuals, makes it a superior cleavage because it makes it more difficult for those outside the winning coalition to ‘switch’ their identity to gain access to state spoils. In other words, as Caselli and Coleman write, ‘Ethnicity provides a technology for group membership and exclusion which is used to avoid indiscriminate access to the spoils of conflict. Without such a technology groups become porous and the spoils of conflict are dissipated’ (Caselli and Coleman 2006: 30). According to this view, then, ethnic exclusion is driven by economic considerations as the ruling coalition seeks to maximize its wealth and retain a monopoly on economic rents. Broadly, this hypothesis resonates with the history of African states from South Africa to Sudan, wherein small groups of ruling elites have reaped tremendous economic advantages from their ethnocratic rule.
Resource Constraints
Following from the above, we would expect that rulers face constant pressure from those inside the regime to narrow the size of the ruling coalition to maximize their spoils. Moreover, we would anticipate that the size of the ruling coalition and the number of groups with access to the central government are contingent on the size of the economy. Put simply, larger economies should provide rulers with the ability to build larger political coalitions. Consistent with this point, Arriola (2009) finds that cabinet sizes in Africa – one observable measure of the ruling political coalition – are strongly correlated to gross domestic product (GDP) per capita. All else equal, he estimates that a US$100 increase in per capita income is associated, on average, with an additional cabinet appointment.
Similarly, economic contraction or expansion would be expected to affect political coalitions. One prominent example often cited is the case of Côte d’Ivoire.9 The country’s first president, Félix Houphouët-Boigny, built a multi-ethnic political coalition to stave off potential opposition and strengthen his hold on power. One region that he reached out to was the north, through political appointments and investment of state resources in development projects in the northern region. However, in the 1980s, in the face of declining revenues after a prolonged economic crisis, the government found it difficult to continue to commit to this redistribution strategy and, after the death of Houphouët-Boigny in 1993, the coalition was more or less abandoned, opening the door for political conflict.
Information Problems and the Logic of Ethnic Exclusion
Economic factors are posited to be key pressures that push rulers to exclude along ethnic lines, but, of course, ethnic exclusion is a costly policy – it reduces societal control, undermines extractive capacity, and in some cases increases the risk of civil war. Thus rulers have to be strategic in their use of ethnic exclusion. While they prefer to maximize spoils, they prefer to do so ‘without precipitating a reaction (such as violent protest or rebellion) from the ethnic group that would be even more costly to suppress’ (Cetinyan 2002: 649). Thus, the ruler’s optimal strategy would be one in which he makes the minimal concessions (e.g. resource transfers and political appointments) necessary to co-opt key members of a rival group and prevent the outbreak of armed rebellion. However, in line with an extensive bargaining literature, these types of transactions are often undermined by information and commitment problems, leading to suboptimal outcomes (Fearon 1995).
As rulers bargain with members of other ethno-regional groups over patronage and political appointments, they are reluctant to offer more than the minimal concessions necessary to win the group’s support and secure social peace. Overpaying eats into the spoils available to the ruling coalition and wastes resources that could be used to buy off other groups. The problem for the ruler is that it is difficult to gauge a group’s mobilizational capabilities.
Rulers face several constraints in this regard. One is that information asymmetries create incentives for parties to misrepresent their true capabilities to win greater concessions (Fearon 1995). Consequently, regimes tend to dismiss a group’s demands and threats at face value and discount the patronage and political appointments it offers. A second constraint is the organizational challenge of collecting and processing information. While all governments and large organizations face this problem, it is especially difficult for weak states that depend on informal political networks to monitor society. Weak states face coverage problems: those areas where the regime is most in need of information, such as ethnic enclaves excluded from the central government, is where the regime has the least penetration and fewest brokers. To compensate, the ruler may rely on nearby regional contacts or co-ethnics and other ‘foreign’ agents deployed to monitor the excluded group. However, these outside brokers often are not enmeshed in the ethnic networks of the excluded group and possess little genuine information about the group’s capabilities and demands. Moreover, as these agents tend to come from rival groups, it is not always in their interest to accurately convey information to the central government, particularly if it means it will lead the central government to adopt new policy concessions that could cut into their own share of spoils.
We would expect these types of information problems to undermine ethnic bargaining and contribute to more exclusive regimes, but over time, as new information is generated – often due to violent mobilization by the marginalized group – we would expect the central government to adjust the minimal concessions it offers in an effort to prevent the conflict from becoming a full-scale civil war. Accordingly, information problems alone cannot account for sustained ethnic exclusion. Commitment problems on the other hand are less forgiving. Even as the costs of exclusion are revealed and conflict escalates, rulers cannot change course and adopt a more accommodative policy if the underlying constraints contributing to ethnic exclusion remain in place.
Political Bargaining in an Environment of Uncertainty
In economic-based models of ethnic bargaining the ruling coalition faces a trade-off between maximizing spoils and social peace. Expanding the coalition to include all politically relevant groups reduces the risk of rebellion but at the cost of diluting the ruling coalition’s share of spoils. The essence of politics is then the bargaining that takes place between the ruling group and other groups over patronage and political appointments. In deciding how to allocate resources, the ruler weighs the costs of accommodation versus the costs of repression.
An important dimension is missing, however, from these economic models: the ruler’s hold on power is not fixed or guaranteed. In fact, this is one of the defining characteristics of post-colonial politics in Africa – the prevalence of irregular transfers of power (Goldsmith 2001). Between 1956 and 2001, coups d’état represented the primary source of regime instability in Africa, accounting for more than 40 per cent of all leadership changes.10 In addition to 80 successful coups, there were 108 failed coups during this period (McGowan 2003). According to the Archigos dataset, since 1960 no region has experienced a higher percentage of irregular transitions of power than sub-Saharan Africa.11
The threat of an irregular transfer of power changes the nature and stakes of the political game. Politics is not merely about relative shares of spoils but absolute control – to lose power is to lose everything. Such strategic concerns are as powerful a motivating force as economic rents and can severely constrain rulers in their bargaining with elites inside and outside their ruling coalition. Rulers cannot commit to accommodative policies that will increase their vulnerability to being ousted from power. This section theorizes how the strategic environment has structured ethnic bargaining and contributed to more exclusive configurations.
Ethnic Bargaining as a Two-Level Game
Ethnic bargaining in Africa can be seen as a two-level game (Putnam 1988). On one dimension rulers are bargaining with members of other societal groups – ‘rivals’– who seek their fair share of access to state resources and representation in the government. On another dimension they are bargaining with those inside the ruling coalition – ‘allies’– who want to preserve their privileged position and share of spoils. As discussed above, with complete information we would expect rulers to make the minimal concessions necessary to rivals to stave off rebellion and to avoid the costs of civil war. However, without buy-in from their allies, who would bear the costs of such a policy, we would expect the promises of accommodation not to be credible.
Burundi and Rwanda in the early 1990s illustrate this dynamic. In Burundi, after decades of exclusive Tutsi rule and episodic outbreaks of mass violence against Hutus – including massacres in 1988 that killed an estimated 20,000 people – in the late 1980s Burundi’s President Pierre Buyoya started to change course.12 In the face of acute international pressure following the 1988 massacres, and as it became increasingly clear ‘that a strategy of rule based solely on oppression could not continue indefinitely’ (Uvin 1999: 266), Buyoya built a more ethnically balanced cabinet and promised a series of political reforms. Despite facing pressure from within the military, including several abortive coups, Buyoya pushed forward and multi-party presidential and parliamentary elections were held in 1993.
In the landmark elections, Buyoya and his National Unity and Progress (UPRONA) party were thoroughly defeated by Melchior Ndadaye and the Front for Democracy in Burundi (FRODEBU). Buyoya accepted the results, making way for the first Hutu-led government since the country’s independence. In the months after the election, however, the Tutsi-dominated military, apprehensive about the transition, struck twice, first in July and then again in October. Though both attempts technically failed, in the second coup the mutinous soldiers assassinated Ndadaye and effectively derailed the political transition. The putsch preserved the military’s political dominance and quashed the new ethnic equilibrium that the elections brought, but at the cost of precipitating a new round of bloodletting and a civil war that would not end until 2006.
While Tutsi military elites sabotaged ethnic accommodation in Burundi in 1993, in Rwanda it was a powerful group of Hutu political extremists, known as the Akazu, who served as the key spoilers. This group, who had strong ties to Rwanda’s President Juvenal Habyarimana and his wife, was motivated by an ideology of Hutu Power that viewed Tutsi as a ‘race alien to Rwanda, and not an indigenous ethnic group’ (Mamdani 2001: 190, emphasis in original). Its members vehemently opposed the August 1993 power-sharing accords in Arusha that Habyarimana signed with the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a predominantly Tutsi rebel movement that invaded Rwanda from Uganda in October 1990. To pre-empt the implementation of the Arusha Accords, and ‘preserve the gains’ made since the 1959 revolution when power was taken from the Tutsi, the Akazu, led by Colonel Théoneste Bagosora, seized de facto control of the government after the death of Habyarimana in a plane crash on 6 April 1994. The Hutu extremists immediately murdered the prime minister, who should have taken over the reins of the government. As Mamdani notes, ‘the death of the president and the killing of the prime minister removed precisely those leaders who had publicly championed an agenda for “ethnic reconciliation” between Hutu and Tutsi’ (Mamdani 2001: 215).
Ethnic Bargaining and the Commitment Problem
The Burundi and Rwanda cases illustrate how insiders’ veto power can undermine accommodative policies pursued by their leaders, but they also illuminate how the strategic environment in Africa’s weak states structures ethnic bargaining. The biggest fear hardliners in Burundi and Rwanda had was that their rivals would convert political concessions into absolute power. In Burundi, the Tutsi-dominated military feared Ndadaye would harness the executive authority he gained through democratic elections to entrench Hutu control and disband the army, leaving Tutsi powerless and defenceless. In Rwanda, members of the Akazu feared that the Arusha Accords – which granted the RPF control of 50 per cent of the officer corps, the ministry of interior, and the right of return of refugees who fled after the 1959 revolution – would open the door for the rebels to seize power and reinstitute Tutsi hegemony (Mamdani 2001).
In theoretical terms, the strategic environment that prevailed in Burundi and Rwanda in the early 1990s aroused fears that adoption of accommodative policies would set in motion a large, rapid, and irreversible shift in the distribution of power.13 With no guarantees that their rivals will not exploit ethnic accommodation to seize absolute power and persecute, or even worse, annihilate, the previous ruling group, incumbents cannot credibly commit to an inclusive policy and instead pursue ethnic exclusion as an inefficient way to protect one’s hold on power. The following two sections explore the conditions in which we would expect the commitment problem to arise and whether it produces ethnic exclusion as predicted.
Regime Change and the Commitment Problem
In Burundi and Rwanda history casts a dark shadow over political bargaining, as events in the past colour how parties read their rivals’ motivations and intentions in the present. In Rwanda, members of the Akazu emphasized that they had to ‘preserve the gains’ made since the 1959 ‘social revolution’ or else the RPF would ‘restore the dictatorship of the extremists of the Tutsi minority’, as one pamphlet published in 1991 described it (Des Forges 1999: 64). Thus, the history of the Tutsi monarchy and fears that Tutsi politicians would try to restore it contributed to the commitment problem the ruling Hutu elite believed they faced in their strategic interactions with the RPF.
The implication of this is that the commitment problem contributes to the reproduction of exclusive regimes – the overthrow of one ethnically dominant cabal merely leads a new one to take its place. While a new ruler recognizes that cutting a deal with his ‘enemies’ and allowing them to retain a share of power in exchange for their political support would help to legitimize his ascension to power and promise to put an end to the cycles of ethnic hatred and conflict, he cannot credibly commit to this because of fears that the old ruling group is intent on reclaiming its political supremacy and will exploit any concessions they receive to achieve this end.
One could argue that this is the predicament in which the RPF found itself after stopping the genocide and seizing Kigali on 4 July 1994. It sought to build a broad-based, post-ethnic state, but it calculated the security situation remained too critical to allow potentially disloyal agents to control the key levers of power and finance. Thus, though the national cabinet included a diversity of figures, real power was concentrated in the hands of a small coterie of RPF elites whose bonds of trust were cemented over time spent together in refugee camps in Uganda, attending the same schools, and in combat, first as part of Yoweri Museveni’s National Resistance Army and then in the RPF. Over time this led to an attrition of opposition figures, who felt their appointments were merely cosmetic, and contributed to the RPF’s monopolization of power and the reproduction of a politically exclusive regime (Reyntjens 2004).
The political strategy that the RPF pursued is not uncommon in post-colonial Africa. Regimes that capture the state by force frequently exclude the ruling group they oust from power (see Roessler 2011). Other prominent cases include Nigeria in 1966 and Uganda in 1971. In Nigeria, the July 1966 counter-coup led by northern officers ‘permanently reversed the ethnic composition of the army. Virtually all of the Igbo soldiers were killed, permanently incapacitated or forced out of their positions. After eliminating Igbos from the army, Northern soldiers consolidated their supremacy at all levels’ (Siollun 2009: 147–48). Similarly in Uganda, after Idi Amin’s rise to power in 1971, co-ethnics of former president Milton Obote in the military were violently purged (Omara-Otunnu 1987).
Co-Conspirators and the Commitment Problem
That irregular transfers of power produce ethnically exclusive regimes is not surprising. After all, by the time of the transfer of power mistrust is already extremely high because of the violent interactions leading up to the regime change, as the cases of Rwanda, Nigeria, and Uganda exemplify. What is more surprising, and what better demonstrates the destabilizing power of the commitment problem in an uncertain strategic environment, is that it not only divides enemies, but also allies, especially co-conspirators – those violent specialists who worked together to forcibly seize power and who assume the most critical and sensitive positions in the new regime.
After seizing power, co-conspirators have much to gain from working together to preserve their control of the state and prevent members of the ancien régime from reclaiming power. However, they also have a lot to lose if any faction among them defects from this bargain and exploits their privileged position to unilaterally usurp power at the expense of others within the regime. Trust built up during their struggle for power often helps to reduce fears of betrayal, but tends to be eroded over time as comrades-in-arms compete for power and economic rents in the new regime. Co-conspirators, who formerly placed their very survival in each other’s hands, can no longer take it for granted that their allies will reciprocate cooperation.
As mistrust deepens, the commitment problem dominates strategic interactions. Fearful of being permanently displaced from the regime or, even worse, killed, the opposing sides manoeuvre to neutralize others’ first-strike capabilities by grabbing hold of strategic ministries, stacking the military and security organs with co-ethnics, and strengthening alliances within the regime. Such manoeuvring, however, tends to increase uncertainty, elevating fears that one’s allies-turned-rivals are preparing to make a bid for power. As the conflict spirals, the rivals calculate that the only way to preserve their political survival is by eliminating the other side, and violent rupture becomes inevitable. When ethnicity structures such elite conflicts, the regime often breaks down along ethnic lines.
Classic examples of this dynamic include the collapse of the Alliance of the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Zaire (AFDL) a mere 15 months after disposing of Mobutu Sese Seko; the violent falling out in the early 1980s between the group of non-commissioned officers in Liberia who had brought an end to the 133-year rule of the Americo-Liberians; and the breakdown of the political alliance between Hissene Habre and his Zaghawa backers, including Hassan Djamous and Idriss Deby, who conspired to take power from Goukoni Oueddei in 1982 and to subsequently wrest northern Chad from Libyan control in 1986 and 1987. In each of these cases the falling out ended with the ruler resorting to ethnic exclusion – Kabila targeting Tutsi, Doe the Gio and Mano, and Habre the Zaghawa – as a means to insulate his hold on power and neutralize his co-conspirators’ coup-making capabilities.
Substituting Civil War Risk for Coup Risk
Overall, ethnic exclusion is conceived as an inefficient strategy that rulers choose to manage the commitment problem they face when sharing power in an uncertain strategic environment. It is designed to deny ethnic rivals’ proximity to and partial control of the key levers of the state in order to prevent them from effecting a sudden and decisive shift in the balance of power. While such a strategy mitigates the risk of a coup d’état from the targeted group, though, the cost is that it destroys the institutional basis of social peace in Africa – ethnic accommodation – and increases the risk of a societal-based rebellion.
In other words, ethnic exclusion serves as a threat substitution strategy – it forces rivals to shift their technology of resistance from the coup to the insurgency. In contrast to coups, in which dissidents use the state apparatus itself to usurp power (Luttwak 1968), insurgencies require a significant mobilization of resources to mount a credible challenge to the central government (Collier et al. 2009). Rather than using extant state institutions, the dissidents have to build and finance their own rebel army, and then cover large swaths of territory to reach the capital and forcibly capture the state. This provides the ruling regime with the time and opportunity to contain the threat from society. In line with this expectation, major insurgencies have proven to be more difficult to organize and much less effective as a technology of capturing power than coups d’état in post-colonial Africa.
Conclusion
This chapter challenges the conventional wisdom on civil war in Africa. It shifts the focus from the material and institutional capacity of the state, to the inter-ethnic bargains that are critical to social peace. Understanding the breakdown of ethnic bargaining is fundamental to understanding civil war in Africa. This chapter has reviewed familiar theses about colonial legacies of societal inequality and the pathologies of neopatrimonialism to argue that the strategic environment in which ethnic bargaining plays out – in particular the low barriers to using force as a means to permanently shift the balance of power in one’s favour – also significantly shapes ethnic political configurations. Ethnic exclusion is theorized to be a function of the commitment problem that rulers face as they share power in the shadow of the coup d’état. Ethnic exclusion insulates the ruling group’s hold on power, though at the cost of forfeiting its societal control and leaving it vulnerable to civil war. This model speaks to the resurgence of devastating violence in Burundi and Rwanda in the early 1990s, but also informs a number of other important cases, including Africa’s Great War, which broke out in the Democratic Republic of Congo in August 1998, the Darfur civil war, and the civil war in Chad in the late 1980s.
Overall this strategic theory of civil war makes two important contributions to the study of armed conflict in Africa. First, it brings the study of politics back in. In contrast to prevailing structuralist accounts that tend to see civil war as a predominantly rural or peripheral phenomenon that hinges on state reach and local dynamics (Kalyvas 2008), the model views civil war as rooted in conflict over the distribution of power and wealth at the centre which then becomes strategically displaced to the periphery.
A second important implication is that if the strategic environment in Africa changes, we would expect the phenomena of ethnic exclusion and civil war to decline. Since the end of the Cold War there has been a dramatic transformation in the nature of political change across sub-Saharan Africa, in which elections have surpassed coups and rebellions as the dominant mode of transfer of power. Coupled with this, the African Union (AU) since 1997 has started to take seriously the threat that unconstitutional changes of government pose to political stability. Article 30 of the constitution of the AU, which superseded the Organization of African Unity (OAU) in 2002, states, ‘Governments which shall come to power through unconstitutional means shall not be allowed to participate in the activities of the Union’.
The shifting strategic environment should facilitate political bargaining, as it helps to mitigate the commitment problem and reduce the risk of ethnic accommodation. However, while coups have declined since the OAU and AU adopted anti-coup measures, it is not clear to what degree this is a consequence of higher costs to seizing power in a coup or unparalleled economic growth during the same period allowing African rulers to consolidate their hold on power. Political strategies by African rulers suggest that they are not taking it for granted that their rivals and enemies have internalized anti-coup norms. As long as rulers fear the shadow of the coup d’état and other sudden challenges to their hold on power, they will continue to fall back on exclusionary political strategies.
1The civil war data are from Fearon and Laitin’s (2003) updated civil war dataset.
2According to the Battle Deaths Dataset from the International Peace Research Institute in Oslo, there were about 1,750,000 battlefield deaths due to civil wars in Africa between 1956 and 2005 (Lacina and Gleditsch 2005). This does not include war-related deaths due to disease, malnutrition, etc., which would increase the figure into the tens of millions.
3This chapter focuses on ethnic cleavages – that is, when individuals with shared ancestry and culture (e.g. language, customs, religion, and sense of homeland) collectively organize and coordinate their behaviour – as opposed to other potential divisions (such as religion, ideology, or region), because of its political salience in many African countries. Ethnicity matters because it is seen to structure more than motivate political action (Hale 2008). In-group norms of reciprocity among co-ethnics facilitate cooperation (Habyarimana et al. 2009), which is critical in the high-stakes game of African politics. This is not to suggest that ethnicity is fixed or represents the only coordination mechanism, but it does assume that it represents one of the principal mechanisms in most countries in the first five decades of independence.
4Wimmer et al. (2009) and Cederman et al. (2010) demonstrate that ethnic inclusion significantly decreases the risk of civil war at both group and state level.
5The Ethnic Power Relations (EPR) dataset was constructed by Wimmer et al. (2009). It provides information on ethnic political configurations in all countries in which ethnicity is deemed politically salient between 1946 and 2005. Derived from a survey of 100 scholars of ethnic politics, the EPR codes each politically relevant ethnic category ‘according to the degree of access to central state power by those who claimed to represent them’ for a given year (Wimmer et al. 2009: 326). Access to power is coded as a seven-point categorical variable: monopoly, dominant, senior partner, junior partner, regional autonomy, powerless, or discriminated. Throughout the chapter, I consider groups coded as junior partner to monopoly in a given year as ‘included’ in the central government, and groups coded as regional autonomy to discriminated as ‘excluded’.
6The figure of 55–60 per cent represents the average across all sub-Saharan African countries between independence (or 1955) and 2005. Of course important variation exists across countries. Some countries such as Malawi and Zambia have always had 100 per cent of politically relevant ethnic groups included in the central government, whereas in Sudan only one group, riverine Arabs, has dominated the central government, representing less than 8 per cent of all politically relevant ethnic groups.
7Much has been written about neopatrimonialism in the African politics literature, including an important body of work that has linked the system of rule to violent conflict (e.g. Reno 1998, 2000; Chabal and Daloz 1999; see also Erdmann, this volume). However, these theories have not been systematically incorporated into the civil war literature, despite the prevalence of civil war and neopatrimonial rule in low-income countries.
8Names correspond to ethnic categories as defined by EPR.
9See Bates (2008), who summarizes the work of Boone (2003) and Azam (2001).
10This figure is calculated using data from Goldsmith (2001) and McGowan (2003).
11Calculated by the author; for the Archigos dataset, see Goemans et al. (2009).
12For a political history of this critical period in which the Hutu-Tutsi, intra-Tutsi, and intra-Hutu dynamics are all explored up through the 1993 elections, see Lemarchand (1994).
13Powell (2006) proffers that this mechanism is at the root of all commitment problems.
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