Gebrewold Belachew - Ethno-political conflicts in Africa IIpart

Ethno-political conflicts in Africa. Patterns of conflict and poverty vary from region to region in Africa. State collapse, failure and weakness in states such as Somalia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan etc. have regional as well as global implications. Though to various extents, all these and other African states are affected by violence and poverty. So far there are no solutions for the Darfur conflict in western Sudan that has killed at least 200,000, displaced 5.4m people internally and another 200,000 as refugees in Chad. DR Congo boasts huge reserves of gold, some 30% of the world's diamond reserves, more than 70% of the valuable coltan mineral and vast deposits of cobalt, copper and bauxite. The civil war of 1998 – 2002 killed at least 4millions. Because of many rebel groups operating in the East of the country in spite of the 17,000 UN peacekeepers, with an annual budget of $1bn, more than 1,000 people are dying every day from war-related causes, including disease, hunger and violence. This lecture attempts to analyse and discuss that security problems in Africa have systemic causes. There are structurally interconnected three conflict systems. First, African states consist of actors and factors that constitute the intrastate conflict system based on cultural, ethnic, gender, religious, linguistic, political and economic marginalization. Second, this intrastate conflict system is structurally dependent on the regional conflict system which is mainly caused by cross border destabilization. Third, both intrastate and regional conflict systems are structurally dependent on the global conflict system which consists of the involvement of the global actors through soft power and/or hard power. In this lecture we shall focus, first, on the theories of conflict, and then try to analyse the conflict situations in Somalia, Sudan and Congo as case studies. GebrewoldBdue (328 KB)