Explaining Ethnic Conflicts

Abstract

Africa is the continent with the most ethnically diverse states in the world (see Posner, 2005). On account of this fact, and given that the states are essentially artificial creations of colonialism—save perhaps Ethiopia and the island states—political conflict defined in ethnic terms is ubiquitous on the continent (see Nzongola-Ntalaja, 1995; Nhema and Zeleza, 2008). There is ample evidence of this reality scattered across the continent. These include the Biafra war in Nigeria during the independence decade of the 1960s and the current oil wars in the Niger Delta Region, the north-south Sudanese civil war and the current Darfur conundrum, the Rwandan genocide of 1994, and the postelection ethnic violence in Kenya in 2008. Of all the political conflicts manifested in ethnic terms in Africa, the Rwandan genocide stands out as the conflagration whose geographic scope, level of civilian mobilization, ferocity of violence, and epic proportions were mind boggling. Within one hundred days between April and July 1994, an estimated one million people were wantonly massacred in a genocidal frenzy whose swiftness stunned the world.