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Ethnicity and Politics

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Feb 1st, 2016
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  1. Introduction
  2.  
  3. Ethnicity is now universally regarded as a key element in the political process in African states. Paradoxically, despite its contemporary currency, the word itself in current usage is recent, first appearing in the Oxford English Dictionary only in 1953. In earlier times, African ethnic groups were commonly labeled as “tribes,” a term that has mostly disappeared from academic usage, owing to its pejorative overtones of “backwardness.” In colonial times, “tribe” was usually regarded as part of the natural order, and widely used as the basis for administrative organization. Anticolonial nationalists at the time of decolonization viewed “tribalism” as an obstacle to nation building, legitimate only in the private realm. However, expectations that ethnicity could be banned from the public square are mostly abandoned. Understandings of ethnicity have evolved in more recent decades. The notion still persisting in popular commentary that early-21st-centry ethnic conflicts reflect “ancient tribal hatreds” is refuted by the historical evidence, showing that they originate no earlier than the 20th century. Indeed, ethnicity is an evolving identity form; many of the early-21st-century ethnonyms are of relatively recent derivation, most emerging no earlier than the 18th century. They were often reshaped by the classification systems of the colonial state or the language unification projects of mission orders. The 19th-century colonial partition took little note of ethnic boundaries; hence the great majority of African states are multiethnic. Ethnicity is variously defined by analysts; in my view, the concept has three basic elements: shared cultural attributes, consciousness, and boundaries. The variable roster of common properties includes shared ancestry, language, social practices, naming conventions, rituals, and culinary and sartorial preferences. Group consciousness is embedded in the name, common history, and ideologies of collective selfhood of an ethnic community. Boundaries are a third defining feature; the ethnic group self-consciousness is defined by awareness of “the other” beyond the cultural border. “We” acquires meaning in face of “they.” Ethnicity varies in its intensity. Not all individuals in a group attach the same importance to ethnic identity. Context matters; the social competition for employment and public goods is more intense in the multiethnic cities than in the countryside. Conversely, rural ethnic competition frequently revolves around competing land claims, especially where indigenous communities confront numerous migrant populations. Electoral competition tends to mobilize identity. Critical defining issues revolve around domination (who rules) and distribution (relative shares of the “national cake”). Elaborated ideologies of identity matter; so also does gender.
  4.  
  5. General Overviews
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  7. Studies of ethnicity in Africa are intertwined with broader comparative study, often situating the phenomenon in a more global setting. Horowitz 2000 and Young 1976 were early contributions to this approach. Anthropology is on home terrain with this topic; valuable overviews from this disciplinary perspective are provided in Erickson 1993 and the French scholarship in Amselle 1998. Cahen 1994 invites French political science to overcome its reticence in acknowledging the central importance of ethnicity. Hyden 2013 situates the ethnic phenomenon in the moral economy of social reciprocities that governs rural society. In the 1980s, as the enduring significance of ethnicity became clearer, conceptual debate emerged around competing analytical perspectives, coalescing in three major orientations: primordialism, instrumentalism, and constructivism. These are reviewed in Young 2012. More ambitious versions of constructivism gave rise to the contested notion that early-21st-century ethnicity was a mere “invention” (Hobsbaum and Ranger 1983, cited under Constructivism; Vail 1989, cited under Constructivism). With the democratization wave sweeping Africa around 1990, many analysts turned their attention to reconciling democracy and ethnicity. Various institutional formulas were explored, such as federalism (Nigeria and Ethiopia), or electoral systems (Reynolds 1999, cited under Consociationalism and Electoral Systems). The simultaneous rise in Africa of violent civil strife, often perceived in ethnic terms, likewise drew analytical attention; Ted Gurr and his Minorities at Risk research center at the University of Maryland was a major contributor (Gurr 2000). In particular, the 1994 Rwanda genocide galvanized research on ethnic violence; Lemarchand 2009 and Straus 2006 (both cited under Genocides) are leading examples. Protracted (Sudan, Senegal) or intermittent (Mali, Niger) civil wars triggered by ethnic or regional secession claims were another stimulus to inquiry. The issue of citizenship also acquired new meaning after 1990; in the previous overwhelmingly autocratic decades, issues of individual or group rights were occluded by arbitrary rule. Liberal philosopher Will Kymlicka (Kymlicka 1995, cited under Consociationalism and Electoral Systems) proposes a formula for reconciling individual and ethnic group rights. Geschiere examines the toxic consequences of new discourses of “indigeneity” in his seminal work Geschiere 2009 (cited under Indigeneity, Citizenship, and Exclusion).
  8.  
  9. Amselle, Jean-Loup. Mestizo Logics: Anthropology of Identity in Africa and Elsewhere. Translated by Claudia Royal. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998.
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  11. Translation of Logiques métisses: Anthropologie de l’identité en Afrique et ailleurs, first published in 1990, a seminal work by a leading French anthropologist, drawing upon social construction theory. The ambiguities of ethnic identity for some major West African groups receive illuminating attention.
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  13. Cahen, Michael. Ethnicité politique: Pour une lecture réaliste de l’identité. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1994.
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  15. Urges French scholarship to engage directly with the phenomenon of ethnicity.
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  17. Erickson, Thomas. Ethnicity and Nationalism: Anthropological Perspectives. London: Pluto, 1993.
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  19. Provides synthesis and useful guide to anthropological literature bearing upon ethnicity and nationalism.
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  21. Gurr, Ted R. Peoples versus States: Minorities at Risk in the New Century. Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace, 2000.
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  23. Author has tracked ethnic conflicts around the globe for more than three decades, provides thorough documentation of the major cases.
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  25. Horowitz, Donald. Ethnic Groups in Conflict. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.
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  27. Proposes a basic framework for conceptualizing ethnic conflict across the Third World, leaning toward a primordialist perspective; highly influential and widely cited book defining the field. First published in 1985.
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  29. Hyden, Goran. African Politics in Comparative Perspective. 2d ed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
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  31. Seminal capstone work by distinguished Africa scholar, whose career extends over the half-century of African independence. He argues that African politics are driven by an “economy of affection,” whose communal orientation underlies ethnic solidarities. Ethnic factors in politics among others are closely examined, while at the same time avoiding overstating their significance. First published in 2006.
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  33. Young, Crawford. The Politics of Cultural Pluralism. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976.
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  35. Combines a conceptual review of types of cultural pluralism, including race and religion as well as ethnicity, and paired comparisons of a number of prime country examples; argues fluid and situational nature of identity, anticipating subsequent instrumentalist and constructivist approaches.
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  37. Young, Crawford. The Postcolonial State in Africa: Fifty Years of Independence. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012.
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  39. Provides half-century narrative of postindependence Africa, marked by three cycles of hopeful developments, followed by disappointing outcomes. Extended coverage is provided of the interaction of democratization and ethnicity, cases of protracted internal war implicating ethnicity, and the interface between territorial nationalism and ethnic solidarities.
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  41. Reference Volumes
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  43. Several major ventures in providing basic reference data on themes relevant to ethnicity and politics deserve mention. An early such venture, now dated but still containing useful data, was the handbook edited by three scholars then associated with the Northwestern University Program of African Studies, Morrison, et al. 1989. Leading Africa scholar John Middleton directed an ambitious four-volume encyclopedia project (Middleton 2008), recruiting many well-known scholars to contribute entries. The Encyclopedia of Nationalism (2001) has many African entries, though global in coverage. German scholars Nolan, Krennerich, and Thibaut at the University of Heidelberg assembled Nolan, et al. 1999, an encyclopedic guide to elections in fifty-three African states.
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  45. Middleton, John, ed. New Encyclopedia of Africa. 5 vols. Detroit: Thomas-Gale, 2008.
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  47. Massive work with many entries relevant to ethnicity.
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  49. Morrison, Donald George, Robert Cameron Mitchel, and John Naber Paden. Black Africa: A Comparative Handbook. 2d ed. New York: Paragon, 1989.
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  51. Though dated, this comprehensive Northwestern project has extensive data on sub-Saharan African states, including demographic figures on ethnic groups.
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  53. Motyl, Alexander, J., ed. Encyclopedia of Nationalism. 2 vols. San Diego, CA: Academic Press, 2001.
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  55. Contributions from many leading scholars in the field; contains a number of African entries, both thematic and particular countries, groups, or leaders.
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  57. Nolan, Dieter, Michael Krennerich, and Bernhard Thibaut, eds. Elections in Africa: A Data Handbook. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
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  59. Invaluable reference, with detailed data on elections in all African states, and capsule summary of their postindependence histories.
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  61. Online Resources
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  63. Several websites provide valuable guides and reliable background information relative to contemporary conflict situations, which invariably have an ethnic dimension. Particularly noteworthy are the Minorities at Risk project at the University of Maryland and the UCLA site African Conflict. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) collects contemporary press reports and official documents pertaining to its refugee relief mandate. Soviet anthropologists built a data set dating from the 1960s, covering ethnic groups around the globe: Narodov_Mira_GREG. Ethnologue provides basic data on over 6,700 language groups around the world.
  64.  
  65. African Conflict.
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  67. Excellent UCLA site specializing in conflict situations, covering current events and reference information; useful links provided.
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  69. Ethnologue.
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  71. A catalogue of more than 6,700 languages spoken in 228 countries. The Ethnologue Name List Index lists over 39,000 language and dialect names, and alternative versions. These can be retrieved by country, region, language name, or family.
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  73. Minorities at Risk Project.
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  75. One of the best sites available, managed by Ted Gurr at the University of Maryland. Gives extensive background on hundreds of ethnic and nationalist conflicts around the world. Organized by world region, country, and group. Includes chronologies of conflicts and bibliographic sources.
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  77. Narodov_Mira_GREG.
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  79. Data set created by Soviet anthropologists in the early 1960s covering ethnic groups in 190 countries, reflecting the primordialist assumptions of the day.
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  81. United Nations High Commission for Refugees.
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  83. Coverage of major emergency situations, usually with an ethnic dimension, extracted from local and international press and other sources.
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  85. Bibliographies
  86.  
  87. A small number of review essays recent enough to capture contemporary literature regarding ethnicity and politics provide valuable bibliographic critiques. Two of them are regional in coverage. Lemarchand 2013 draws upon the author’s unique knowledge of Central Africa and the Great Lakes region to unravel the analytical debates raging about this critical focal point of complex ethnic conflict. Spear 2003 offers a critical perspective on the “invention of ethnicity” thesis once common to the constructivist orientation. The work in Young 2002 is the most comprehensive coverage of the field, but now more than a decade out of date. A few overall bibliographies regarding Africa merit note, covering early-21st-century publications. Barringer publishes annually books related to Africa appearing the preceding year, such as Barringer 2012; the quarterly International African Bibliography covers books and journal articles, while the Current Bibliography on African Affairs indexes journal articles.
  88.  
  89. Barringer, Terry A., ed. African Bibliography 2012: Works on Africa Published during 2011. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012.
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  91. Books and journal articles relating to Africa, organized by subregion and country, and indexed by subject. Published annually since 1984; 2012 is the most recent.
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  93. Current Bibliography on African Affairs.
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  95. Quarterly annotated bibliography of journal articles, organized thematically and indexed by subregion and country.
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  97. International African Bibliography.
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  99. Quarterly bibliography of books and journal articles as well as titles of individual chapters in edited books, organized by subregion, country, and theme.
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  101. Lemarchand, René. “Reflections on the Recent Historiography of Eastern Congo.” Journal of African History 54 (2013): 417–437.
  102. DOI: 10.1017/S002185371300073XSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  103. Fine critical bibliographic essay, covering the Central African vortex of genocidal violence and multiple violent ethnic conflicts afflicting the entire Great Lakes region.
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  105. Spear, Thomas. “Neo-Traditionalism and the Limit of Invention in British Colonial Africa.” Journal of African History 44 (2003): 3–27.
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  107. Excellent critical bibliographic essay covering the debate on the “invention” of ethnicity, or constructivism taken to its extreme.
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  109. Young, Crawford. Ethnicity and Politics in Africa. Boston: Boston University African Studies Center, 2002.
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  111. Extensive bibliographic review synthesizing conceptual debates relative to the politics of ethnicity, with a focus on sub-Saharan Africa and country studies of Congo-Kinshasa, Uganda, and Tanzania.
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  113. Journals
  114.  
  115. The following journals cover early-21st-century Africa, and often contain articles or book reviews relevant to ethnicity. Africa Today and Journal of Modern African Studies focus on contemporary events and issues, as does Canadian Journal of African Studies. Africa tends to have an anthropological focus; African Studies Review has an interdisciplinary vocation. Cahiers d’Etudes Africaines and Politique Africaine are the two best French journals with some pertinent contributions relative to ethnicity. Nations and Nationalism and Ethnic and Racial Studies cover studies of ethnic and other nationalisms with the latter having some focus on issues of multiculturalism.
  116.  
  117. Africa.
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  119. Journal of the International African Institute, dating from the interwar years, with a traditional focus on anthropology.
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  121. Africa Today.
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  123. Published by Indiana University, with a focus on current issues.
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  125. African Studies Review.
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  127. Journal of the African Studies Association (ASA), published since 1958, as African Studies Bulletin until 1970. Reflects the interdisciplinary commitment of ASA; occasional major commissioned review essays around an important theme.
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  129. Cahiers d’Etudes Africaines.
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  131. Excellent French journal, occasionally containing extensive review essays.
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  133. Canadian Journal of African Studies.
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  135. Journal of the Canadian African Studies Association. Bilingual with interdisciplinary focus.
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  137. Ethnic and Racial Studies.
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  139. Published in the United Kingdom, with focus on issues of multiculturalism.
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  141. Journal of Modern African Studies.
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  143. Highly regarded journal dating from 1962, publishing contemporary articles mainly on political and economic affairs.
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  145. Nations and Nationalism.
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  147. Long edited by dean of nationalism studies Anthony Smith, focuses on issues of nationalism and its frequent ethnic underpinnings.
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  149. Politique Africaine.
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  151. French journal whose issues usually focus upon a given theme.
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  153. Modes of Understanding
  154.  
  155. By the 1990s, comparative studies of ethnicity in Africa and elsewhere had coalesced into three dominant analytical themes: primordialism, instrumentalism, and constructivism. Primordialism assumed that ethnic identity was a timeless essence, closely tied to affective beliefs of common ancestry and extended kinship. As the impact of ethnicity in decolonization competition for power became clear by the 1960s, instrumentalism emerged, insisting on the situational and contingent nature of ethnic identity, and its activation in pursuit of social and political goals. Constructivism, stressing the possible malleability of identity in response to evolving circumstance, only found full voice and name by the 1980s, in tandem with its parallel appearance as an influential approach to international relations. Works focusing upon one or another of these orientations are cited in the sections that follow; the citations below highlight contributions that bridge the three. Chandra 2006 is a particularly influential analysis of the meanings and categories of ethnicity, though with a disposition toward the constructivist approach. Mortimer 1999 is an assembled collection of distinguished contributors with different perspectives. Though most early-21st-century analysis acknowledges the pertinence of all three dimensions, the distinctions are useful in critical review of the literature. See also the separate Oxford Bibliographies article on Invention of Tradition.
  156.  
  157. Chandra, Kanchan. “What Is Ethnic Identity and Does It Matter?” In Annual Review of Political Science. Vol. 9. Edited by Nelson R. Polsby, 397–424. Palo Alto, CA: Annual Reviews, 2006.
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  159. Critical survey of approaches to understanding ethnicity, by an influential author leaning toward a constructivist perspective.
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  161. Mortimer, Edward, ed. People, Nation and State: The Meaning of Ethnicity and Nationalism. London: I. B. Tauris, 1999.
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  163. Thoughtful reflections on approaches to understanding ethnicity and nationalism, including essays by Africanists Robin Cohen, defending primordialism, and Terence Ranger, diluting his earlier association with the “invention” of ethnicity.
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  165. Primordialism
  166.  
  167. Older approaches to identity tended to assume the essentialist nature of ethnicity, without using the “primordialism” term. The affective dimension to identity, and its intense emotional hold on the actor, was paramount. The active sense of shared ancestry—and a sentiment of extended kinship—shape behavior, an element stressed in Horowitz 2000 (cited under General Overviews). “Blood of my blood, bone of my bone” is the aphorism cited by a leading primordialist scholar, Walker Connor. Conversi 2002 gathers an array of contributions in celebration of the Connor oeuvre, with varying degrees of fidelity to his approach. Attachment to language can be another potent emotive identifier, stressed in Fishman 1997. Gil-White 1999 offers unusual empirical evidence of the primordial hold of identity, based on imaginative interviews in Mongolia. Isaacs 1975 and Smith 1986 argue the power of ancestral and historical narratives in embedding ethnic consciousness and, for the latter, its issue in nationalism in the unspoken assumptions of a populace.
  168.  
  169. Conversi, Daniel, ed. Ethnonationalism in the Contemporary World: Walker Connor and the Study of Nationalism. New York: Routledge, 2002.
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  171. Valuable collection devoted to the work of an eloquent defender of primordialist theses, including the contributions of a number of leading scholars loosely aligned with this school, including Donald Horowitz, Anthony Smith, and Brendan O’Leary.
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  173. Fishman, Joshua. In Praise of the Beloved Language: A Comparative View of Positive Ethnolinguistic Consciousness. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1997.
  174. DOI: 10.1515/9783110813241Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  175. Distinguished sociolinguist makes plea for recognition of the deep emotional attachments tied to language. A strong advocate of language preservation, he sees protection of the native tongue as central to group well-being.
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  177. Gil-White, Francisco J. “How Thick Is Blood? The Plot Thickens. . . : If Ethnic Actors Are Primordialists, What Remains of the Circumtancialist/Primordialist Controversy?” Ethnic and Racial Studies 22.5 (1999): 789–820.
  178. DOI: 10.1080/014198799329260Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  179. An arresting brief for primordialism, grounded in the often-valid claim that the average person takes identity for granted as a natural given, and does not interrogate its origins, possible fluidity, or situational mobilization.
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  181. Isaacs, Harold. Idols of the Tribe: Group Identity and Political Change. New York: Harper & Row, 1975.
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  183. A classic text of the primordialist perspective. Drawing on the metaphorical narrative of the ancestral origins of the Kenya Kikuyu, in the primeval “House of Mumbi,” he argues the enduring power of the affective tie.
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  185. Smith, Anthony D. The Ethnic Origin of Nations. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986.
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  187. Prolific scholar, of whose various works on ethnie and nation this is but one example. He insists that authentic nationalism originates in a core, nation-forming ethnic group whose identity has long historical roots.
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  189. Instrumentalism
  190.  
  191. The first recognition of the possible change dynamic intrinsic to ethnicity in Africa came with the rapid growth in urban centers after World War II. Novel forms of what was first labeled “supertribalism” became evident, with new migrants whose ethnic numbers were small, tending to identify themselves as members of larger groups sharing a common region of origin, or lingua franca; French sociologists Georges Balandier and Paul Mercier took note of this phenomenon in the 1950s. The trials and tribulations of urban migration introduced new circumstances where broader ethnic self-definitions were instrumental in overcoming challenges of employment, housing, school fees, and medical costs. The multiplication of competitive elections in the 1950s as independence approached injected another new theater for the definition and performance of identity. Anthropologists linked to the Rhodes-Livingston Institute in Central Africa such as Max Gluckman and J. Clyde Mitchell were key contributors, working in the Zambian Copperbelt. Ambitious politicians discovered that ethnic affinity provided vote banks available for mobilization, a key factor in the birth of instrumentalism, a dimension of electoral politics carefully examined in Melson and Wolpe 1971 and Kasfir 1976. Cohen 1974 was also an influential early contribution to an understanding of instrumental uses of urban ethnicity. Hardin 1995 links instrumentalism to rational choice theory, while Habyarimana, et al. 2009 applies rigorous empirical inquiry to identify its operation in Kampala. Olzak and Nagel 1986 draws together essays covering a range of areas to refine the meaning and uses of instrumentalist perspectives.
  192.  
  193. Cohen, Abner, ed. Urban Ethnicity. Papers presented at a conference sponsored by the Association of Social Anthropologists of the Commonwealth, held in London, 31 March–3 April 1971. London: Tavistock, 1974.
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  195. Classic work examining the novel aspects of ethnicity as it becomes redefined in large urban centers. Cohen documents the emergence of new forms of urban ethnicity.
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  197. Habyarimana, James, Macarton Humphreys, Daniel N. Posner, and Jeremy Weinstein. Coethnicity: Diversity and the Dilemmas of Collective Action. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2009.
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  199. Based upon ground-level empirical research in Kampala, Uganda, the authors explore dilemmas of collective action in pursuit of collective goods in multiethnic urban centers. They find that coethnics are better able to cooperate, having great mutual trust, willingness to work together, ability to gauge each other’s intent, and sanction failure to collaborate.
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  201. Hardin, Russell. One for All: The Logic of Group Conflict. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995.
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  203. Systematic application of rational choice theory, by the 1990s a leading methodological orientation in political science, to ethnic conflict. He argues that ethnic solidarity facilitates overcoming the “free rider” problem in group action.
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  205. Kasfir, Nelson. The Shrinking Political Arena: Participation and Ethnicity in African Politics, with a Case Study of Uganda. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976.
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  207. A key work setting forth an instrumentalist perspective in framing Ugandan politics, where identity politics based on ethnicity and religion had been the defining element in decolonization politics and after.
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  209. Melson, Robert, and Howard Wolpe. Nigeria: Modernization and the Politics of Communalism. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1971.
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  211. Nigeria by its size, population numbers, and diversity became a crucial model for instrumentalism. The populous nation first drew political science to the analysis of ethnicity, dating from the 1958 classic work by James S. Coleman, Nigeria: Background to Nationalism (Berkeley: University of California Press).
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  213. Olzak, Susan, and Joane Nagel, eds. Competitive Ethnic Relations. Orlando, FL: Academic Press, 1986.
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  215. Uniquely rigorous application of an explicitly instrumentalist approach in interpreting ethnicity. The contributions are drawn from a range of regions, including Africa.
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  217. Constructivism
  218.  
  219. Partly growing out of instrumentalism, constructivism as a distinctive approach crystallized in the 1980s. Its stress upon contingency, fluidity, and malleability of identity found compatible conceptual currents in the postmodern orientations influencing some social sciences, especially anthropology. If ethnicity was an evolving phenomenon, responsive to circumstance, then inquiry beckoned into the sources of ethnic consciousness, its historical origins, and modalities of evolution and change. Scott 1998 illuminates one of its elements in state compulsion to classify and label populations under its rule through its census mechanisms, a process inevitably involving reducing ethnic complexity into easily legible categories. Anderson 2006, though the writing of nationalism rather than ethnicity, provided a seminal foundation for constructivist analysis when first published in 1983. Hobsbaum and Ranger 1983, Amselle and M’Bokolo 1985, and Vail 1989 were other foundational works in establishing the constructivist school. Lentz and Nugent 2000 shows its value in interpreting ethnicity in Ghana, while Comaroff and Comaroff 2009 examines its possible uses as a commodity. By the 1990s, constructivism had become a mainstream approach to the conceptualization of ethnicity. Worth noting is the concurrent emergence in international relations theory of “constructivism” as an influential paradigm, many of whose assumptions were similar, though its content was somewhat different.
  220.  
  221. Amselle, Jean-Loup, and Elikia M’Bokolo, eds. Au coeur de l’ethnie: Ethnies, tribalisme et état en Afrique. Paris: La Découverte, 1985.
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  223. Valuable collection covering several African cases, an early application of constructivist theory.
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  225. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 2006.
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  227. First published 1983. Immensely influential work, whose exegesis of the origins of nationalism largely transfers to the study of ethnicity. This seminal volume was a landmark in the emergence of constructivism.
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  229. Comaroff, John J., and Jean Comaroff. Ethnicity, Inc. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.
  230. DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226114736.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  231. Intriguing collection of mostly African cases, arguing ethnicity is a self-consciously fashioned, morally anchored selfhood, which in modern times may be subject to commodification for economic purposes. A number of intriguing cases of the commercialization of ethnicity document their thesis.
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  233. Hobsbaum, Eric, and Terence Ranger, eds. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
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  235. Foundational collection of essays shaping constructivist theory. Ranger subsequently argued that his own contribution had been misinterpreted, and that rather than “invention,” his intended focus was the mutual adaptations of notions of identity and understandings of “tradition.”
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  237. Lentz, Carola, and Paul Nugent, eds. Ethnicity in Ghana: The Limits of Invention. New York: St. Martin’s, 2000.
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  239. Excellent collection, covering identity origins and evolution in a number of Ghanaian ethnic groups. Major ethnic categories have differing degrees of antiquity, but all have evolved in important ways; some are entirely recent, and others significantly redefined.
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  241. Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998.
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  243. Ingenious analysis of the ways in which contemporary states with their compulsion to construct “high modernism” are driven to impose legibility on complex realities, with evident application to ethnicity. The census and its classification of populations is a major example; economy of categories, ethnic and other, imposes a formal taxonomy that masks underlying complexities.
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  245. Vail, Leroy, ed. The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.
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  247. Outstanding collection of monographs based on southern African cases, documenting the ways in which contemporary ethnic units had been reshaped or in some cases even created by colonial rulers, in interaction with African customary leaders.
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  249. Ethnicity and the State
  250.  
  251. The contemporary African nation-state, equipped with fixed boundaries and armed with sovereignty, is the authoritative arena for interactions and, at times, conflict between ethnic groups. The ethnic balances of power are highly visible to the citizenry, as are the communal divisions of public goods. With the regular competitive elections required by the African democratization wave around 1990, even where subsequently diluted into semi-authoritarianism, political parties often (though not always) reflect ethnoregional alliances. Much constitutional ingenuity has been devoted to the search for formulas containing the conflict potential in ethnicity: federalism, decentralization, prohibitions on formal ethnic connections to political parties, and electoral systems. In many cases, framing new constitutions was based upon wide inquiry into international experience. Berman, et al. 2004; Glickman 1995; and Rothchild 1997 all address the strategies and options for African states to manage ethnicity in the altered circumstances of democratization, while Nnoli 1998 gathers African contributors to propose an explicitly African perspective. Laitin 1992 shows the importance of widespread multilingualism in reducing pressures for language rights. Hino, et al. 2012 examines the economic consequences of political opening. At the same time, harmful doctrines have emerged, raising issues of “who belongs” and questioning the rights to membership in the national community of some groups. This membership, embodied in the formal status of citizenship, has taken on new meaning at the end of the 1980s with the demise of authoritarian modes of rule, which had subordinated society members as mere subjects and not collective and individual rights-bearing citizens. Mamdani 1996 offers a historical gloss on the different relationships to the state of rural and urban populations.
  252.  
  253. Berman, Bruce, Dickson Eyoh, and Will Kymlicka, eds. Ethnicity and Democracy in Africa. Oxford: James Currey, 2004.
  254. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  255. Excellent collection of essays covering different African examples. Particularly noteworthy is the influential contribution by John Lonsdale, “Moral and Political Argument in Kenya,” pp. 73–95, contrasting the moral community embodied in ethnic solidarity with the political exploitation of ethnicity, characterized as amoral tribalism.
  256. Find this resource:
  257. Glickman, Harvey, ed. Ethnic Conflict and Democratization in Africa. Atlanta, GA: African Studies Association, 1995.
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  259. Useful collection of contributions from a diverse set of authors, half African. The essays were written at an early stage in the democratization era.
  260. Find this resource:
  261. Hino, Hiroyuki, John Lonsdale, Gustav Ranis, and Frances Stewart, eds. Ethnic Diversity and Economic Instability in Africa: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
  262. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9781139198998Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  263. Reflections of a distinguished international array of scholars on diverse aspects of the interplay of state, ethnicity, and the economic realm.
  264. Find this resource:
  265. Laitin, David. Language Repertoires and State Construction in Africa. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
  266. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511666759Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  267. Original exploration of the importance of multilingualism in Africa and its implications for ethnic relations. The analysis demonstrates how widespread multilingualism serves to remove emotive issues of state preference for given indigenous languages from the policy table, reducing potential for ethnic conflict.
  268. Find this resource:
  269. Mamdani, Mahmood. Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996.
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  271. Proposes a sharp contrast between the colonial legacy in rural areas, whose populace was containerized in supposed customary ethnic units as mere subjects of colonial chiefs, while urban Africans were legal individuals not chained to the group designations employed as population compartments by the colonial administrations.
  272. Find this resource:
  273. Nnoli, Okwudiba, ed. Ethnic Conflicts in Africa. Dakar, Senegal: CODESRIA, 1998.
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  275. Edited by a Nigerian scholar with numerous publications on ethnic conflict in Nigeria. CODESRIA (Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa) is a Pan-African research center, built around African scholarship, seeking to inject an African perspective into research.
  276. Find this resource:
  277. Rothchild, Donald S. Managing Ethnic Conflict in Africa: Pressures and Incentives for Cooperation. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1997.
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  279. Insightful review by a prolific and influential scholar of widely used mechanisms for overcoming ethnic conflict invoked by many African leaders. Many relied upon what Rothchild terms “hegemonial exchange,” or the division of public goods between dominant leaders who are expected to share the benefits with their followings.
  280. Find this resource:
  281. Consociationalism and Electoral Systems
  282.  
  283. The theory of consociationalism formulated in Lijphart 1977 entered African debates in the 1990s when more than two-thirds of the states created new or heavily revised constitutions. Consociationalism seeks to reconcile multiethnicity and democracy through institutional formulas assuring ethnic group representation in state institutions proportional to their numbers, relying on summit diplomacy among group leaders to negotiate conflict resolution. A key mechanism is the kind of electoral system chosen. In debating the constitutional pathways for postapartheid South Africa, Lijphart 1985 and Horowitz 1991 stake out different positions, with the former preferring proportional representation, and the latter arguing the alternate vote system as a better option. Single-member districts, while assuring better linkage between parliamentarians and their constituencies, tend to marginalize smaller groups. Proportional representation, many electoral specialists argue, is more likely to result in ethnically inclusive results, a position argued in Reynolds 1999 and Reynolds 2002, as well as in Lijphart and Grofman 1985. Norris 2008 casts a skeptical eye on the conflict resolution potential of consociational formulas, especially if imposed from the outside. Kymlicka 1995 places the issue in the broader frame of adapting a liberal political order to the need to accommodate the group rights inherent in ethnic claims.
  284.  
  285. Horowitz, Donald L. A Democratic South Africa? Constitutional Engineering in a Divided Society. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.
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  287. Argues the importance of an electoral system that offers incentives for ethnic cooperation; introduces the useful notion of a “metaconflict,” or the struggle to define the essence of the conflict.
  288. Find this resource:
  289. Kymlicka, Will. Multicultural Citizenship. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
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  291. Distinguished political philosopher proposes formulas for reconciling the moral order of liberalism, grounded in the individual, with the group claims inherent to multicultural societies.
  292. Find this resource:
  293. Lijphart, Arend. Democracy in Plural Societies. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977.
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  295. An early formulation in global comparative terms of his influential theory of consociationalism. Key elements in this formula for reconciling democracy and cultural pluralism include (ethnic) segmental autonomy, proportionality in access to power, and summit diplomacy by segmental leaders to resolve major problems.
  296. Find this resource:
  297. Lijphart, Arend. Power-Sharing in South Africa. Berkeley: University of California Institute of International Studies, 1985.
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  299. Argues the applicability of consociational theory to resolving conflict in South Africa. In the final decade of apartheid rule, some currents of white opinion found the Lijphart theory attractive, though he argues that the final 1983 effort of white-ruled South Africa at constitutional reform failed to eliminate the exclusion of key racial and ethnic groups, and thus fell short of the requirements of consociationalism.
  300. Find this resource:
  301. Lijphart, Arend, and Bernard Grofman, eds. Choosing an Electoral System: Issues and Alternatives. New York: Praeger, 1985.
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  303. Comprehensive review of the array of available electoral systems, and their respective consequences for assuring equitable representation for ethnic and racial groups. The preferences are mainly for one of the variants of proportional representation.
  304. Find this resource:
  305. Norris, Pippa. Driving Democracy: Do Power-Sharing Institutions Work? Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
  306. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511790614Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  307. A skeptical look at African and other experiences with consociational formulas, especially when imposed from outside. She notes that power-sharing constitutional schemes rely on the flawed premise that ethnic and religious identities are fixed and enduring.
  308. Find this resource:
  309. Reynolds, Andrew. Electoral Systems and Democratization in Southern Africa. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
  310. DOI: 10.1093/0198295103.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  311. Argues the relevance of the ethos surrounding the concept of consociationalism to constitutional engineering in southern Africa. Differing electoral systems have important consequences in shaping ethnic representation; Reynolds contributes an encyclopedic knowledge of the menu of possible choices and how they have operated in many different settings.
  312. Find this resource:
  313. Reynolds, Andrew, ed. The Architecture of Democracy: Constitutional Design, Conflict Management, and Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
  314. DOI: 10.1093/0199246467.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  315. Essays edited by a former student of Lijphart. Reynolds is a leading Africa-centered analyst of electoral systems. Arend Lijphart and Donald Horowitz contribute essays pursuing their debate on consociationalism, with the latter arguing the alternative vote system offers better prospects than conventional proportional representation.
  316. Find this resource:
  317. Federalism
  318.  
  319. Global experience in accommodating cultural pluralism through constitutional formulas suggests federalism as one promising device, notably utilized in Switzerland, Canada, Belgium, and India, and ultimately unsuccessfully in the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. Yash Ghai, a legal scholar involved in the constitutional drafting of culturally diverse countries on several continents, explores federalism and other formulas for ethnic autonomy in Ghai 2000. There are only two major African examples, Nigeria and Ethiopia. In the Nigerian case, the first version of federalism gave special status to the three largest ethnic communities, creating insecurity and a sentiment of marginalization for smaller groups, while magnifying rivalries among the three large ethnic blocs. The subsequent reworking of the “federal character” of Nigeria, now a sacrosanct constitutional principle, steps away from ethnicity as a sole determining criterion for the boundaries of the present thirty-six states, while seeking to diffuse conflict by multiplying their numbers. The Nigerian experience receives thoughtful treatment in Suberu 2001. In Ethiopia, the Afro-Marxist regime (1974–1991) borrowed Leninist nationality theory from its Soviet patron to redraw provincial borders; then in the 1994 effort to create an ostensibly democratic constitution, the successor regime reframed the system as ethnic federalism. While ending the Amhara cultural, linguistic, and political dominance, and permitting other languages to flourish, ethnonationalist unrest remains, especially among Oromo and Somali. The Ethiopian experiment in ethnic federalism finds excellent coverage in Turton 2006 and Smith 2013. Elsewhere in Africa, the centralized tradition of the colonial legacy has remained, with constitutional reform limited to decentralization.
  320.  
  321. Ghai, Yash, ed. Autonomy and Ethnicity: Negotiating Competing Claims in Multi-Ethnic States. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
  322. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511560088Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  323. Extensive review of federalism and other forms of ethnic group autonomy. Ghai has served as constitutional advisor in a number of such settings, and as well, a recent position leading a Kenya commission that proposed extensive decentralization and a multiplication of what had been only eight provincial units.
  324. Find this resource:
  325. Smith, Lahra. Making Citizens in Africa: Ethnicity, Gender, and National Identity in Ethiopia. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
  326. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9781139547468Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  327. Links the self-determination accorded to cultural communities through the introduction of ethnic federalism to the ideal of effective citizenship. The historical domination of Amharic language and culture has clearly been transformed, and other language communities have flourished. Gender equity is also requisite for full citizenship to be operative.
  328. Find this resource:
  329. Suberu, Rotimi. Federalism and Ethnic Conflict in Nigeria. Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace, 2001.
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  331. Judicious and balanced assessment of the operation of federalism in Nigeria by a leading Nigerian scholar specializing in this topic. A troublesome feature of Nigerian federalism is the issue of “indigeneity certificates” by the state governments, limited to natives of the state and required for access to state employment and contracts.
  332. Find this resource:
  333. Turton, David, ed. Ethnic Federalism: The Ethiopian Experience in Comparative Perspective. Oxford: James Currey, 2006.
  334. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  335. Various aspects of the Ethiopian experiment in ethnic federalism are examined, with comparative chapters on Nigeria and India. Though successful in language policies, some problematic aspects are identified.
  336. Find this resource:
  337. Indigeneity, Citizenship, and Exclusion
  338.  
  339. Democratization, even if it retreated into some hybrid form of semi-authoritarianism, raised the stakes of cultural identity, and injected the issue of citizenship and its content, a key theme of Oomen 1997 and contributors to Dorman, et al. 2007. New or reignited struggles opened over questions of land rights for those migrating to other regions and the status of cross-border migrants. “Who belongs” in a number of countries became a burning question. In some countries, such as Ivory Coast, toxic doctrines such as “Ivoirité” came to the fore, questioning the authenticity of citizenship claims for those originating in the northern region, and even more those immigrating from neighboring countries. In addition to Ivory Coast, these issues are especially salient in South Africa, Congo-Kinshasa, Nigeria, Cameroon, Rwanda, and Angola. Geschiere 2009 provides a seminal comparative analysis of emergent discourses of exclusion, while Lynch 2011 and Rupp 2011 give detailed attention to ethnic struggles over land rights in Kenya and Congo-Kinshasa, respectively. Herbst 2000 provides a valuable comparative examination of citizenship rules in Africa, rooted not just in individual legal status, but also ancestral rights as part of an ethnic group established in the territory at the time of colonial partition, Paul, et al. 2003 interrogates the viability of the doctrine of the united sovereign nation-state in an era of rising tides of cultural pluralism.
  340.  
  341. Dorman, Sara, Daniel Hammett, and Paul Nugent, eds. Making Nations, Creating Strangers: States and Citizenship in Africa. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2007.
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  343. Examines the intense conflicts surrounding citizenship claims and autochthony doctrines in a number of African countries. Contributors take note of a special dimension to citizenship definitions in Africa, which are often rooted not just in individual lineage, but also membership in an ethnic community situated in the territory at the time of creation of the colonial state.
  344. Find this resource:
  345. Geschiere, Peter. The Perils of Belonging: Autochthony, Citizenship and Exclusion in Africa and Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.
  346. DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226289663.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  347. A distinguished European anthropologist explores the insidious effect of doctrines of indigeneity incorporated into state ideologies in Ivory Coast, Cameroon, Congo-Kinshasa, and elsewhere.
  348. Find this resource:
  349. Herbst, Jeffrey. States and Power in Africa: Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000.
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  351. Argues many African states are weakened by difficult political geography, limiting their capacity to broadcast power. He provides an important survey of migration and citizenship rules in Africa.
  352. Find this resource:
  353. Lynch, Gabrielle. I Say to You: Ethnic Politics and the Kalenjin in Kenya. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.
  354. DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226498096.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  355. Shows how a constructed Kalenjin identity emerged only in 1940, as an umbrella for ten smaller groups, who also retain an active sense of their respective affinities. Migration of large numbers of other Kenyans, especially Kikuyu, led to violent Kalenjin attacks, especially at election time, in defense of the claimed land and other rights of indigeneity.
  356. Find this resource:
  357. Oomen, Tharaileth K. Citizenship, Nationality and Ethnicity: Reconciling Competing Identities. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 1997.
  358. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  359. Early work exploring different aspects of the array of “who belongs” issues that surged to the fore in Africa following democratization.
  360. Find this resource:
  361. Paul, Thazha V., G. John Ikenberry, and John A. Hall. The Nation-State in Question. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003.
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  363. Essays by well-known scholars interrogating the future of the nation-state. Bernard Yack queries the possibility of a purely civic territorial nationalism, and Jeffrey Herbst points to the absence in Africa of a state-building impact of armed conflict, in contrast to the often-cited Charles Tilly aphorism applicable to Europe, “the state makes war, war makes the state.”
  364. Find this resource:
  365. Rupp, Stephanie. Forests of Belonging: Identities, Ethnicities, and Stereotypes in the Congo River Basin. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011.
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  367. Shows entangled identities of small groups in northeastern Congo, contrasting and contested categories, and ongoing struggles over “autochthony,” or who belongs. The picture is further complicated by contradictory legislation.
  368. Find this resource:
  369. Ethnicity and Political Parties
  370.  
  371. From the birth of modern political parties in Africa in the 1950s, their history has been entangled with the ethnic question. For party organizers, ethnic communities are potential vote banks, with the group tending to follow the lead of their key leaders. Conversely, if a party is too heavily identified with a given group, this tends to repel others, especially if they have conflictual relations with the ethnic community in question. At the time of independence, parties sought to overcome the fragmenting potential of ethnicity by creating political monopolies, which were then given legal status after independence as juridical single parties. Over time, this led to atrophy of the party to become a mere instrument of autocracy. Democratization opened a new era for parties, with a wide range of outcomes. Bratton and van de Walle 1997 and Lindberg 2006 provide overviews of the introduction of competitive elections. Elischer 2013 finds that five different types of party systems have emerged, with varying interfaces with ethnicity. Arriola 2012 and Basedu, et al. 2007 find that multiethnic alliances are both feasible and, in many instances, necessary to win legislative majorities. Forrest 2004 finds that subnational alliances will push hard for group autonomy, a challenge to the postcolonial state.
  372.  
  373. Arriola, Leonard R. Multiethnic Coalitions in Africa: Business Financing of Opposition Election Campaigns. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
  374. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9781139108553Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  375. Prize-winning book pursuing an original line of inquiry into the emergence of effective multiethnic coalitions in the postdemocratization era. Arriola offers compelling evidence that the explanation lies in recent financial liberalization, permitting private African capital holders to acquire the means to provide resources to opposition coalitions. These “pecuniary coalitions” have altered the opportunity structure for multiethnic party alliances.
  376. Find this resource:
  377. Basedu, Matthias, Gero Erdmann, and Andreas Mehler, eds. Votes, Money and Violence: Political Parties and Elections in Sub-Saharan Africa. Uppsala, Sweden: Nordiska Africainstitutet, 2007.
  378. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  379. Valuable collection taking stock of party role in structuring competitive democratic elections, now based on four rounds of national voting since 1990 democratization. Though ethnicity is omnipresent in discourse, only multiethnic alliances can win enough votes to compete effectively at the national level.
  380. Find this resource:
  381. Bratton, Michael, and Nicolas van de Walle. Democratic Experiments in Africa: Regime Transitions in Comparative Perspective. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
  382. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9781139174657Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  383. Major contribution to illuminating the initial phase of democratic transitions in Africa. They set the analytical framework for understanding democratization as well as take a sober but hopeful look at its difficulties.
  384. Find this resource:
  385. Elischer, Sebastian. Political Parties in Africa: Ethnicity and Party Formation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
  386. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9781139519755Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  387. Ground-breaking study by a German scholar explicitly exploring the interface between political party systems in ten African states and ethnic solidarities. He identifies five different types of parties: the mono-ethnic, the ethnic alliance, the catch-all, the programmatic, and the personalistic.
  388. Find this resource:
  389. Forrest, Joshua. Subnationalism in Africa: Ethnicity, Alliances, and Politics. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2004.
  390. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  391. Broad comparative review of the interplay of ethnicity and political movements in a range of African sites. Subnational alliances, either ethnic or regional, tend to agitate for greater group autonomy. The increasing salience of subnational movements poses a growing challenge to the postcolonial state.
  392. Find this resource:
  393. Lindberg, Staffan I. Democracy and Elections in Africa. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006.
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  395. Argues the importance of the accumulation of experience in the organization of elections in Africa. With repeated itineration of national elections, hopeful signs are seen of the possibility of a positive learning experience.
  396. Find this resource:
  397. Ethnicity and Alternative Identities
  398.  
  399. Ethnicity in its political role has a complex interface with some parallel identities: nationalism, race, and religion. Ethnicity differs from nationalism in the nature of the claims made on its behalf. Nationalism is rooted in the demand for self-determination, and a state of its own, or minimally full autonomy. A number of authors have reflected on the surprising durability of African states and naturalization of territorial nationalism in the public imaginary, despite the historical artificiality of most, notably Englebert 2009 and Young 2012 (cited under General Overviews). Race is ultimately based on phenotype, unrelated to ethnicity, historically linked to subordination and hierarchy. Racial categories in Africa were a product initially of the slave trade, then confirmed by the categories of colonial rule. Religion, defined by cosmology and theology, is sometimes linked to ethnicity but has different sources of identity formation.
  400.  
  401. Englebert, Pierre. Africa: Unity, Sovereignty and Sorrow. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2009.
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  403. Seminal volume reflecting on the puzzle of persistence of African states in the face of regional and ethnic challenges, in spite of the failure of many to provide effective security or services to the citizenry. The international weapon of the doctrine of sovereignty and its corollary of international recognition proves a potent insulation to weak states.
  404. Find this resource:
  405. Borders and Territorial Nationhood
  406.  
  407. African borders in many cases transect ethnic groups, though only in the Somali case has this given rise to enduring claims for reshaping states. African independence could only be won through accepting the culturally arbitrary boundaries of the colonial partition; since the contemporary state is joined by hyphenation to the nation, the postcolonial leaders embraced the doctrine of territorial nationalism as legitimating ideology. Although the separatist voice on the basis of ethnicity or region has been raised in a number of cases, only the South Sudan secession in 2012 has succeeded. Buchanan and Moore 2003 explores the normative criteria legitimating given boundaries, and evaluating secession claims. Falola and Usman 2009 situates border issues in the deeper flow of migration histories. Contributors to Larémont 2005 consider the surprising persistence of the African state, despite its historic artificiality. Smith 2003 shows how territoriality becomes absorbed into the idea of nationhood. Brown 2000 reviews the varying forms of nationalism and their relations to notions of territoriality. Miles 1994 and Nugent 2002 show how important ethnic communities divided by an international border over time evolve in differing ways.
  408.  
  409. Brown, David. Contemporary Nationalism: Civic, Ethnocultural and Multicultural Politics. New York: Routledge, 2000.
  410. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  411. Excellent synthesis of the different forms taken by the doctrine of nationalism; argues the doctrine contains potentially competing myths of common ancestry and shared territorial commitment.
  412. Find this resource:
  413. Buchanan, Allen, and Margaret Moore, eds. States, Nations and Borders: The Ethics of Making Boundaries. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
  414. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511613937Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  415. Historically oriented philosophy essays on the normative dimensions of boundary definition. Buchanan debates with his colleagues on the ethical criteria for evaluating the legitimacy of secession claims, justified only to redress serious injustice.
  416. Find this resource:
  417. Falola, Toyin, and Aribidesi Usman, eds. Movements, Borders, and Identities in Africa. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2009.
  418. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  419. Longer historic review of African population movements, showing the importance of long-distance trade merchants, warrior groups, and Muslim clerics in shaping subsequent identities.
  420. Find this resource:
  421. Larémont, Ricardo René, ed. Borders, Nationalism, and the African State. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2005.
  422. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  423. Argues that full consolidation of the African state as a national entity can only be achieved over an extended time frame. At the same time, the surprising durability of the African state system is acknowledged by the contributors, two of whom, Francis Deng and Herbert Weiss, here and elsewhere offer evidence of the degree of attachment to the existing states in two of the largest and most problematic, Sudan and Congo-Kinshasa.
  424. Find this resource:
  425. Miles, William F. S. Hausaland Divided: Colonialism and Independence in Nigeria and Niger. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994.
  426. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  427. Sparkling monograph, eloquently highlighting the important contemporary differences among Hausa communities on the two sides of the Nigeria-Niger border, a product of the differential impact of British and French administrative policies in educational, administrative, and religious policies.
  428. Find this resource:
  429. Nugent, Paul. Smugglers, Secessionists, and Loyal Citizens on the Ghana-Togo Border: Life of the Borderlands since 1914. Oxford: James Currey, 2002.
  430. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  431. Shows how Ghanaian Ewe along the Togo border are active in cross-border illicit commerce with their coethnics, but mostly do not support Ewe unification under Togo rule.
  432. Find this resource:
  433. Smith, Anthony D. Chosen Peoples. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
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  435. Goes beyond earlier works insisting on historical ethnie as the root of a nation, to argue the role of nationalism as a political religion, willed and expressed as a product of shared myths and memories linked to a named territory.
  436. Find this resource:
  437. Race
  438.  
  439. The idea of race arises from the unequal interaction of Europeans and Africans, especially through the slave trade, and then colonial rule. The coerced diaspora of many millions of Africans to slavery in the Americas enrooted ideas of racial difference and hierarchy. The colonial state further entrenched categories of race, with the subject population denoted by such collective terms as native, black, indigene, or African, with a subordinate legal status until decolonization was at hand. Beginning in the Caribbean and American African diasporas, race was reformulated as a positive ideology, in the form of pan-Africanism, a natural solidarity of the oppressed. Pan-Africanism became an essential theme to anticolonial nationalism, and subsequently expressed in continental and regional inter-African structures, notably the Organization of African States and its African Union successor (Ackah 1999). Aminzade 2013; Forster, et al. 1999; and MacDonald 2006 examine the role of racial identity in the larger frame of African nationalism in eastern and southern Africa where European and South Asian immigrants were numerous. Jok Maduk Jok 2007 considers the particular case of South Sudan, where the dominant racial other were northern Arab Muslims. Fredrickson 2002 and Cornell and Hartmann 1998 offer a global analytical perspective on race consciousness as a form of identity. Stone and Dennis 2002 sorts out the commonalties and contrasts between race and ethnicity as identity forms.
  440.  
  441. Ackah, William B. Pan-Africanism, Exploring the Contradictions: Politics, Identity and Development in Africa and the African Diaspora. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1999.
  442. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  443. Useful overview of the ideological and organizational evolution of the continental doctrine of racial solidarity.
  444. Find this resource:
  445. Aminzade, Ronald. Race, Nation, and Citizenship in Post-Colonial Africa: The Case of Tanzania. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
  446. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9781107360259Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  447. Demonstrates the importance of racial consciousness in the portfolio of identities among Tanzanian citizens, and the dilemmas of eligibility for citizenship for immigrated residents of Asian or European origin.
  448. Find this resource:
  449. Cornell, Stephen, and Douglas Hartmann. Ethnicity and Race: Making Identities in a Changing World. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge, 1998.
  450. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  451. Wide-ranging comparative inquest into the variable interface between identities founded in ethnicity and racial differences, framed by the three conceptual approaches reviewed earlier (primordialism, instrumentalism, and constructivism).
  452. Find this resource:
  453. Forster, Peter, Michael Hitchcock, and Francis Lyimo. Race and Ethnicity in East Africa. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1999.
  454. DOI: 10.1057/9780230800069Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  455. Shows the racial component to territorial nationalism, particularly evident in eastern and central Africa where white settlers and a South Asian mercantile class were numerous and their entitlement to postcolonial citizenship was hotly debated.
  456. Find this resource:
  457. Fredrickson, George M. Racism: A Short History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002.
  458. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  459. Valuable, succinct summary of racial doctrines from a leading scholar noted for his comprehensive comparative histories of the operation of race in South Africa and the United States.
  460. Find this resource:
  461. Jok Maduk Jok. Sudan: Race, Religion, and Violence. Oxford: Oneworld, 2007.
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  463. Untangles the complex forces of difference of race, religion, and ethnicity in Sudan, which help explain the decades of armed revolt and ultimate separation of the southern region.
  464. Find this resource:
  465. MacDonald, Michael. Why Race Matters in South Africa. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.
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  467. Illuminates the interplay of notions of race, nation, and ethnicity in South Africa, linking the discussion to comparative discourse on these themes.
  468. Find this resource:
  469. Stone, John, and Rutledge Dennis, eds. Race and Ethnicity: Comparative and Theoretical Approaches. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002.
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  471. Collection of essays by influential contributors, underlining footprints of Max Weber and Fredrik Barth in shaping definitions of race and ethnicity. Contributors include Brendan O’Leary, Anthony Smith, and Richard Jenkins.
  472. Find this resource:
  473. Religion
  474.  
  475. The religious landscape was also transformed in the colonial period. Islam had been long established in northern Africa, but the relative order of imperial rule facilitated its southward expansion. The Christian mission endeavor from modest beginnings also gained momentum over time, boosted by its association with the introduction of modern education and health services. Both major religions have continued to expand in postcolonial times, though neither constitutes a monolithic block, with Islam divided by Sufi brotherhoods, the four legal schools, and fundamentalist movements, and Christianity by Catholic and Protestant versions, mission orders, denominations, and more recently surging Pentecostal and Evangelical currents. Hastings 1997 insists that “biblical watering” is essential for the flowering of African nationalism. Falola 1998 and Laitin 1986 analyzes the important Yoruba case, unusual in representing a very large group almost equally divided between Muslim and Christian—a source of growing conflict for Falola—and an example of surprising ecumenical harmony. See also the separate Oxford Bibliographies articles on African Traditional Religion, African Christianity, and Islam in Africa.
  476.  
  477. Falola, Toyin. Violence in Nigeria: The Crisis of Religious Politics and Secular Ideologies. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 1998.
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  479. Outstanding Nigerian historian shows how Nigeria falls victim since the 1980s of a deepening conflict along the Islam/Christianity religious fault lines, in the context of a would-be secular state.
  480. Find this resource:
  481. Hastings, Adrian. The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
  482. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511612107Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  483. Wide-ranging comparative study of linkages between ethnicity, religion, and nationalism. He argues that African nationalism “has hardly existed except where it has been ethnically based, linguistically held together, and biblically watered.”
  484. Find this resource:
  485. Laitin, David D. Hegemony and Culture: Politics and Religious Change among the Yoruba. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.
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  487. Important work exploring the absence of religious tensions among the Yoruba, a very large ethnic configuration in Nigeria with large numbers of Muslims and Christians. Ancestral town, however, is a major source of subethnic division.
  488. Find this resource:
  489. Varieties of Ethnicity
  490.  
  491. The works cited in this section underline the complex variability of ethnic consciousness. At one end of a spectrum of identity intensity, ethnicity is only weakly affirmed and perhaps of recent derivation; at the other, it rests upon a well-elaborated ideology of collective selfhood, equipped with written histories and standardized languages. Ethnic groups are not closed corporate groups, bouncing off each other like billiard balls. They are permeable at the margins, interact in multiple ways with “the other” beyond an often-fuzzy boundary, a point underlined in a remarkably prescient article by Aidan Southall, who argued that ethnic identities were multiple, multilevel, overlapping, and evolving long before this became conventional wisdom (Southall 1970). The depths of cultural consciousness on which the ethnic actor can draw vary widely, depending on the vitality and codification of the myths and memories upon which identity rests. In the last analysis, the performance of ethnic identity is carried out at the individual level, frequently navigating between multiple levels of group consciousness, from family and lineage through clan, to the maximal levels of cultural consciousness. Not all individuals within a group will experience ethnic consciousness with the same intensity. Nor do all groups have comparable levels of ideological formulation, consolidated in cultural resources such as written histories or print languages. These points are developed in a pair of influential French works, Bayart 2005 and Martin 1994.
  492.  
  493. Bayart, Jean-François. The Illusion of Cultural Identity. Translated by Steven Rendall, Janet Roitman, and Jonathan Derrick. London, UK: Hurst, 2005.
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  495. Translation of Illusion identitaire, first published in French (Paris: Fayard, 1996). The author offers a strong critique of what he terms “culturalism,” or the attribution of causality to ethnic consciousness, in reality a complex and unstable form of identity.
  496. Find this resource:
  497. Martin, Denis-Constant. Cartes d’identité: Comment dit-on “nous” en politique. Paris: Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1994.
  498. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  499. A wide-ranging collection, mainly French authors, several African cases covered; an invitation to French social scientists, heretofore reticent, to incorporate ethnicity into their analysis.
  500. Find this resource:
  501. Southall, Aidan. “The Illusion of Tribe.” Journal of Asian and African Studies 5.1–2 (1970): 28–50.
  502. DOI: 10.1177/002190967000500104Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  503. Illuminating article proposing a far more nuanced and subtle understanding of ethnicity than the primordialist understandings then current among his fellow anthropologists.
  504. Find this resource:
  505. Cultural Expressions of Ethnicity
  506.  
  507. Ethnicity is frequently expressed and performed in the cultural domain. This is most clearly the case in the crucible of urban life and in the encounters with the multiple domains of modernity. Cohen 1969 shows how Nigerian Hausa urban immigrants redefined themselves culturally by adopting an Islamic Sufi order distinct from their prior rural affiliation. Parkin 1978 examines urban identity reformulation among Luo migrants in Nairobi, who transformed a rural lineage system into a network of urban welfare associations. The contributors to Werbner 2002 deploys the discourse of postcoloniality to examine the different ways that ethnicity finds cultural expression.
  508.  
  509. Cohen, Abner. Custom and Politics in Urban Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969.
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  511. Shows how Hausa immigrants to Ibadan (outside their ethnic homeland) adapted through massive conversion in a two-year period to the Tijaniyya Sufi brotherhood.
  512. Find this resource:
  513. Parkin, David. The Cultural Definition of Political Response Lineal Destiny among the Luo. New York: Academic Books, 1978.
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  515. Insightful study of Luo migrants to Nairobi replacing the rural lineage system of identity definition into an urban hierarchical frame of urban welfare and political societies.
  516. Find this resource:
  517. Werbner, Richard, ed. Postcolonial Subjectivities in Africa. London: Zed Books, 2002.
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  519. Explorations of cultural consciousness in a number of African settings, drawing upon critical theory relating to postcoloniality. The contributors are mainly anthropologists.
  520. Find this resource:
  521. Contexts
  522.  
  523. The activation and intensity of ethnic identity is strongly influenced by social and political context. Beckerleg 2010 offers an intriguing example of how the consumption of the mild narcotic khat became a marker of Somali identity. Another obvious example is an electoral campaign, when parties or candidates are associated with particular ethnic communities; Lewis 2002 demonstrates the operation of this factor in Somalia, where the introduction of competitive elections politicized and affirmed clan and subclan identities. Posner 2005 demonstrates in the Zambia case how national and local elections interrogate identity differently, with countrywide party competition producing broad groupings around a handful of linguae francae. When civil order degenerates into armed conflict implicating competing ethnic groups, the broadly defined contending communities may face acute security dilemmas, well portrayed in Deng 1995 and Lewis 2010. In other settings, much more localized coethnicity ties are needed: the quest for a necessary document or employment favor in a government office, for example. Here, shared affinity through an ethnic category numbering millions is unlikely to offer sufficient social proximity for success; a more immediate tie of kinship, village origin, or local community ties would be needed. In addition life experiences and circumstances, and varying degrees of attachment to the myths and memories that provide the affective substance to group solidarities, enter the identity equation.
  524.  
  525. Beckerleg, Susan. Ethnic Identity and Development: Khat and Social Change in Africa. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
  526. DOI: 10.1057/9780230107786Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  527. Shows how the consumption of khat, a mild narcotic found in Yemen and the Horn of Africa, became a marker of Somali identity. Long a distinctive habit limited to Yemenis and Somalis, consumption is beginning to spread to other groups in Uganda, Kenya, and Ethiopia.
  528. Find this resource:
  529. Deng, Francis. War of Visions: Conflict of Identities in the Sudan. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1995.
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  531. Sudanese scholar from the south gives an eloquent summary of the ambiguities of identity in both north and south; he served at moments in diplomatic roles for the Sudan government. His analysis of the origins and evolution of the “Arab” identity in northern Sudan shows its initial construction from small groups of mostly male migrants from Arabia, then reinforcement by the availability of the ideologies surrounding the Arab nation.
  532. Find this resource:
  533. Lewis, I. M. A Modern History of the Somali. 4th ed. Oxford: James Currey, 2002.
  534. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  535. Based on a lifetime of anthropological research among the Somali, argues the defining rule of kinship in their multilayered ethnic identity, with a strong ethnonationalism at the pan-Somali level. The language of clan division is largely shaped by a half-dozen clan families. However, operative everyday solidarity functions mainly at a subclan and lineage level. First published 1965.
  536. Find this resource:
  537. Lewis, I. M. Making and Breaking States in Africa: The Somali Experience. Trenton, NJ: Red Sea, 2010.
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  539. Detailed guide to the disintegration of the Somali state in 1991, and the complex interplay of clan and lineage struggles for power and security that has driven the breakdown of what in 1960 was seen as a promising African state with an exceptionally unified national identity. The clan and kinship focus of Lewis is contested by part of the Somali intelligentsia.
  540. Find this resource:
  541. Posner, Daniel N. Institutions and Ethnic Politics in Africa. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
  542. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511808661Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  543. Excellent monograph, building upon his original research in Zambia to propose a broader comparative argument, grounded in instrumentalist logic informed by rational choice theory. When political competition is local, the seventy-three ethnic groups in the official census come into play; when the battle is national, identities built around the three or four major regional groups dominate.
  544. Find this resource:
  545. Historical Narratives and Exemplary Cases
  546.  
  547. A key variable explaining variable degrees of the intensity of ethnicity lies in the availability of a well-elaborated historical narrative. A handful of cases illustrated in the citations stand out in this respect: the Yoruba in southwest Nigeria (Akintoye 2010, Falola and Genova 2006, Peel 2000), the Ganda in southern Uganda (Wrigley 1996), the Zulu in South Africa (Hamilton 1998), and Arabs across the northern tier of the continent (Hill 2009, Maddy-Weitzman 2011, Suleiman 2011). An effective narrative includes a myth of origin; a unified language equipped with dictionaries, grammars, and print literature; a celebratory account of group evolution; and often a success image in the competition for social ascent in the modern world. Arab identity stands out in its transnational character, its ties with both secular nationalism and Islam, and its unique standing as the liturgical language of Islam. See also the separate Oxford Bibliographies articles on Nigeria, the Great Lakes States of Eastern Africa, Uganda, Southern Africa to c. 1850, and South Africa post c. 1850.
  548.  
  549. Akintoye, S. Adebanji. A History of the Yoruba People. Dakar, Senegal: Amalion, 2010.
  550. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  551. Interesting ethnohistory, tracing group beginnings back a millennium through the amalgamation of many small groups; assumes a group before it acquired an umbrella name and identity as Yoruba, which by most accounts only takes form in the 19th century. He shows the syncretization of Yoruba religious culture in its contacts with Christianity through the slave diaspora in Brazil and Cuba.
  552. Find this resource:
  553. Falola, Toyin, and Ann Genova, eds. Yoruba Identity and Power Politics. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2006.
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  555. Goes back to the origin myths around Oduduwa, the eponymous ancestor. They trace the civil wars of the 18th and 19th centuries, resulting in a large flow of slaves to Brazil and Cuba in the final stages of slavery; one consequence was a sense of Yorubahood reflected in the cults of Santaria (Cuba) and Candomble (Brazil), as well as a reverse flow of Yoruba mercantile freedmen.
  556. Find this resource:
  557. Hamilton, Carolyn. Terrific Majesty: The Powers of Shaka Zulu and the Limits of Historical Invention. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.
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  559. Traces the rise of the warrior-king Shaka, in building an extensive ethnopolitical empire from small beginnings early in the 19th century, and how through its chronicles, a Zulu identity came to cover a large region in southern Africa.
  560. Find this resource:
  561. Hill, Jonathan N. C. Identity in Algerian Politics: The Legacy of Colonial Rule. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2009.
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  563. Explores the two main lines of cleavage, Islamists versus secular nationalists, and Arab versus Berber from colonial times to the present.
  564. Find this resource:
  565. Maddy-Weitzman, Bruce. The Berber Identity Movement and the Challenge to North African States. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011.
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  567. Remarkable study of the Berber (Amazigh) movements in Morocco, Algeria, and in smaller numbers, Libya and Tunisia, contesting (especially in Morocco and Algeria) Arabism as exclusive national identity. The Amazigh linguistic and cultural umbrella, which contains a number of important subgroups such as the Kabyls in Algeria, also includes the Tuareg in northern Mali and Niger.
  568. Find this resource:
  569. Peel, John D. Y. Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000.
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  571. Traces the 19th-century Christian mission interface with indigenous cosmology in the crystallization of Yorubahood. Two mission alumni Samuel Crowther and Reverend Samuel Johnson, played critical roles in ethnic construction: Crowther in creating a unified written Yoruba based in the Oyo dialect, and Johnson in publishing A History of the Yoruba Peoples (Lagos, 1921).
  572. Find this resource:
  573. Suleiman, Yasir. Arabic, Self and Identity: A Study in Conflict and Displacement. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
  574. DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199747016.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  575. Sociolinguistic study of the role of Arabic language in Middle East and North Africa. He examines the different, partly competing variants of Arabic, from the classical or liturgical form through Modern Standard Arabic used in the press and radio, to the highly distinct regional versions (Moroccan and Egyptian versions are sharply different).
  576. Find this resource:
  577. Wrigley, Christopher. Kingship and State: The Buganda Dynasty. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
  578. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511584763Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  579. Explains the powerful hold of ethnic identity in Buganda, with the mystique surrounding the kingdom a key element. Early contributions by key Ganda elites such as Katikiro (Prime Minister) Sir Apolo Kagwa and Ham Mukasa around the turn of the 20th century, comprising an early print version, incorporated into subsequent histories by British missionaries and historians.
  580. Find this resource:
  581. Ethnicity and Violence
  582.  
  583. The link between ethnicity and violence became a salient issue in the 1990s, when a wave of civil wars—nineteen by my count—affected two large swathes of territory, from the Horn southwestward to the two Congos, and from Senegal to Liberia in West Africa. Diamond and Plattner 1994 provides examples from the early phase of democratization. Bay and Donham 2006 documents the important youth dimension to the web of conflict. Since then many of the conflicts have been resolved, often through international mediation, frequently including United Nations peacekeeping missions. In virtually all the internal wars, ethnicity became implicated to some degree at least, though in a number, identity conflicts were not the primary driver (for example, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Angola); Fearon and Laitin 1985 provides a compelling empirical analysis of the limits to ethnic interpretations. The scale of the phenomenon gave rise to an abundant literature, of which only a sampling can be provided here. Young 2012 (cited under General Overviews) summarizes most of these internal wars, and provides references for the individual wars and their varying degree of ethnic drivers, too numerous for a full listing here of major sources. Previous decades also witnessed some episodes of civil wars, though many fewer at any given time, and for the most part qualitatively different. The most frequent instances were armed liberation struggles (Guinea-Bissau, Angola, Mozambique, Eritrea), secessionist warfare (Igbo separatism in Nigeria, southern Sudan revolt against an Arab Islamist regime), and reform insurgencies (Uganda, Ethiopia). Ethnic factors were especially prevalent in the last two. Kalyvas, et al. 2008 and Laitin 2007 provide wide-ranging comparative analyses of the factors driving disorder and upholding ethnic comity.
  584.  
  585. Bay, Edna G., and Donald L. Donham. States of Violence: Politics, Youth, and Memory in Contemporary Africa. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006.
  586. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  587. Essays surveying various forms of political violence in contemporary Africa, ethnic and other.
  588. Find this resource:
  589. Diamond, Larry, and Marc F. Plattner, eds. Nationalism, Ethnic Conflict, and Democracy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.
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  591. Essays drawn from the Journal of Democracy, review edited by Diamond and Plattner. They draw on cases from Africa and elsewhere, and are framed by comparative essays by noted authors Ghia Nodia, Francis Fukuyama, and Shlomo Aveneri.
  592. Find this resource:
  593. Fearon, James D., and David D. Laitin. “Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War.” American Political Science Review 97.1 (1985): 75–90.
  594. DOI: 10.1017/S0003055403000534Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  595. Classic and oft-cited article, providing convincing empirical evidence that ethnicity per se is not the primary cause of civil wars.
  596. Find this resource:
  597. Kalyvas, Stathis N., Ian Shapiro, and Tarek Masoud, eds. Order, Conflict, and Violence. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
  598. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511755903Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  599. Essays examine factors explaining maintenance of order, as well as those leading to its destruction. Kalyvas has been particularly influential in stressing the ground-level dimensions of conflict and order.
  600. Find this resource:
  601. Laitin, David D. Nations, States and Violence. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
  602. DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199228232.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  603. Proposes an empirically grounded argument that multiculturalism has value, while exploring the trade-offs in both promoting and containing nationalism.
  604. Find this resource:
  605. Genocides
  606.  
  607. The searing tragedy of the 1994 Rwanda genocide, with ethnically motivated mass killings in a few weeks of an estimated 800,000, mostly Tutsi, dramatized by its sheer scale and speed, as well as its deliberate ethnic targeting. An earlier genocidal episode in neighboring Burundi in 1972, with the same ethnic populations but Hutus as the primary victims, had attracted only minimal international attention, but received careful interpretation in Lemarchand 1994. But the reluctance of the global community to intervene in Rwanda, in spite of the presence of a small UN contingent, was a source of shame for the major powers. There was, after all, a 1948 UN Convention on Genocide that appeared to provide an obligation for international intervention. The sheer scale and horror of the Rwanda genocide attracted a number of remarkably documented studies, which cumulatively provide a comprehensive portrait; these include des Forges 1999, Lemarchand 2009, Longman 2011, Straus 2006, Mamdani 2001, and Stover and Weinstein 2004. The Genocide Convention, based primarily on the Holocaust and the deliberate murder of six million Jews by the German Nazi regime, defined three criteria: state action, intentionality, and targeting of a given ethnic, religious, or racial group. For many, the mass killings of Armenians in 1915 by the Ottoman state also qualified. The creation of the International Criminal Court and the subsequent UN declaration of an International Right to Protect were influenced by the Rwandan tragedy, which clearly met the definition. More murky was the case of the mass killings in Darfur beginning in 2003, examined in Chaliand 2005; less evident was a Sudan government intention to exterminate a given group, though some governments, including the United States, declared the atrocities to be a genocide. See also the separate Oxford Bibliographies articles on Rwanda” and Burundi.
  608.  
  609. Chaliand, Gérard. Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005.
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  611. Able, political reporting capturing the essence of the large-scale killings pitting Arab militias, backed by the Sudan government, against various Darfur groups, usually collectively described as “Africans” in seeming racial contrast to “Arabs.”
  612. Find this resource:
  613. des Forges, Alison. “Leave None to Tell the Story”: Genocide in Rwanda. New York: Human Rights Watch, 1999.
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  615. Human Rights specialist with exceptionally deep knowledge of Rwanda; she provides massive and meticulous detail on the unfolding of the genocide.
  616. Find this resource:
  617. Lemarchand, René. Burundi: Ethnicide in Theory and Practice. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center, 1994.
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  619. Best study of the 1972 Burundi genocide targeting Hutu, which took the lives of between 100,000 and 200,000. This atrocity attracted little international attention at the time that it occurred.
  620. Find this resource:
  621. Lemarchand, René. The Dynamics of Violence in Central Africa. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009.
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  623. Authoritative collection of essays written in recent years concerning Rwanda, Burundi, and Congo-Kinshasa, where he has done research for more than five decades; excellent analysis of both the 1972 Burundi genocide and the Rwandan calamity of 1994.
  624. Find this resource:
  625. Longman, Timothy. Christianity and Genocide in Rwanda. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
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  627. Fine study, building on research gathered on site during the period immediately before the genocide, concerning the political role of the Christian churches.
  628. Find this resource:
  629. Mamdani, Mahmood. When Victims Become Killers: Nativism, Colonialism, and the Genocide in Rwanda. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001.
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  631. Important work illuminating the role that was played by mythologies—Tutsi immigration as a superior race from Ethiopia, mostly originating in colonial sources; by framing them as a racial other, Hutu perpetrators invoking indigeneity claimed justification to massacre the alleged interlopers.
  632. Find this resource:
  633. Prunier, Gérard. The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995.
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  635. Detailed account by French scholar with deep knowledge of region. Work is especially strong on Ugandan dimension.
  636. Find this resource:
  637. Stover, Eric, and Harvey M. Weinstein, eds. My Neighbor, My Enemy: Justice and Community in the Aftermath of Mass Atrocity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
  638. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511720352Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  639. Based on extensive surveys in Rwanda and former Yugoslavia, seeking understanding of policy options in the wake of genocidal episodes; explores uses and limits of judicial proceedings to punish active engagement in atrocities.
  640. Find this resource:
  641. Straus, Scott. The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006.
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  643. Masterful study, building upon interviews with hundreds of perpetrators and a deep knowledge of the region to frame a nuanced analysis of the causation and ground-level dynamics of the genocide.
  644. Find this resource:
  645. Internal Wars
  646.  
  647. William Reno in a pair of classic works (Reno 1998, Reno 2011) provided the basic framework of interpretation for the wave of internal wars peaking in the 1990s: the emergence of new forms of insurgent action, with obscure agendas beyond power seeking, and enabled by an influx of black-market arms and novel modes of finance through exploitation of high-value resources. Ethnicity became entangled to some degree in most of the African internal wars, but usually was not itself the primary cause. The weakened condition of many states following the deepening economic crises of the 1970s and especially 1980s left many countries unable to eliminate insurgent challenges. Of the nineteen cases during the 1990s, only two civil wars were ended by central government defeating the insurgents (Angola and Algeria), and in three other cases rebel movements seized power (Uganda in 1986, Chad in 1990, and Rwanda in 1994). In other cases where the wars ended, external mediation by neighboring states, pan-African instances, or the international community was required. The wars, especially those enduring over extended periods (for example, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Congo-Kinshasa) often involved serious human rights abuses. In their wake, difficult challenges of achieving local reconciliation and transitional justice remained. The focus in this section is upon major works that involved multiple countries or provided comparative analysis bearing on the ethnic dimensions. Chirot and Seligman 2001 emphasizes the psychological dimension. Boås and Dunn 2007 focuses on the grievances motivating insurgents. Horowitz 2001 offers a global comparative focus on the urban ethnic riot. Prunier 2009 and Reyntjens 2009 provide penetrating analyses of the tangle of local, regional, and cross-border warfare mainly situated in Congo-Kinshasa. See also the separate Oxford Bibliographies articles on Democratic Republic of the Congo (Zaire) and Liberia.
  648.  
  649. Boås, Morten, and Kevin C. Dunn. African Guerrillas: Raging against the Machine. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2007.
  650. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  651. Contributions cover a number of the recent insurgencies. Authors seek to explain the grievances that motivate guerrillas, rejecting the passe-partout invocation of simple greed as the main driver.
  652. Find this resource:
  653. Chirot, Daniel, and Martin E. P. Seligman, eds. Ethnopolitical Warfare: Causes, Consequences, and Possible Solutions. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2001.
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  655. Collection from noted contributors organized by the American Psychological Association, whose editors were persuaded that the discipline of psychology offered conceptual and methodological resources to make a fruitful contribution to overcoming ethnopolitical warfare.
  656. Find this resource:
  657. Horowitz, Donald L. The Deadly Ethnic Riot. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.
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  659. Broad, comparative study on a global scale of outbreaks of ethnically defined rioting. He brings to bear on the topic a lifetime of research on ethnic conflict, and theorizing about its basis, its targets, and its dynamics.
  660. Find this resource:
  661. Prunier, Gérard. Africa’s World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
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  663. Informed and detailed analysis of the interconnected wars that have plagued the nations of Central Africa, continuing to this day, presented by a knowledgeable French observer.
  664. Find this resource:
  665. Reno, William. Warlord Politics and African States. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998.
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  667. Early work in the field among the first to identify the novel features of the 1990s wave of internal wars. He gives special emphasis to the weakening of the fabric of governance in many states, and gives especially strong insights to the Liberia and Sierra Leone cases.
  668. Find this resource:
  669. Reno, William. Warfare in Independent Africa. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
  670. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511993428Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  671. Seminal work reflecting two decades of research on irregular warfare in different parts of the continent. The author has traveled to the sites of internal wars from West Africa to the Horn of Africa, and has a special knack for research in dangerous locations.
  672. Find this resource:
  673. Reyntjens, Filip. The Great African War: Congo and Regional Geopolitics, 1996–2006. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
  674. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511596698Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  675. Masterful study of the Congo-Kinshasa wars and their connections to earlier genocidal outbreaks in neighboring Rwanda and Burundi. Author has unmatched regional knowledge and expertise.
  676. Find this resource:
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