The books reviewed here are written with clarity and passion and they deserve a comprehensive readership. They all embrace a sweeping geographical and conceptual terrain, but the authors presuppose no prior African studies knowledge or expertise. While soaring and panoptic, these books are also richly detailed and nuanced. No single review can do them justice. Each is a major contribution that merits attention from anyone concerned with armed conflict in Africa and efforts to resolve those conflicts.
William Reno’s book is part of the Cambridge University Press series, “New Approaches to African History,” which is designed to introduce students and general readers to current findings and new ideas in African history. Reno, who is a political scientist, highlights two significant features influencing warfare in Africa during the past fifty years. First, African warfare and its practitioners have always operated within an existing state system based on European colonial divisions of territory and European imposed conceptions of sovereignty. The inviolability of borders and the sanctity of sovereignty explain why intrastate rather than interstate warfare has been the norm in Africa. Second, over the past fifty years the grievances motivating rebellion have remained fairly constant. What has changed are the politics that shape rebels’ fields of leverage and the global reception of rebels and their aims. The book’s major message is that “the nature of politics in the states in which they fight plays a key role in shaping the organization and behavior of rebels” (161).
The political imperatives that shape rebels’ actions have severe consequences for noncombatants. Reno observes that “conflict in much of Africa has shifted from a focus on battles over which side should control and administer the non-combatant population to a situation in which governing non-combatants is often less relevant as a central strategy of war fighting” (2). Both government forces and opposition groups who challenge the authority of African regimes (and both of which are termed “rebels” by Reno) exhibit high degrees of fragmentation and little capacity to instill a common sense of purpose among combatants and noncombatants alike. This fragmentation and kaleidoscopic array of motivation and purpose is not owing solely to human frailty and avarice. Reno also stresses the complexity and the contingency of what it means, using James Scott’s memorable phrase, to “see” like a state (Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, Yale University Press, 1999).
Reno identifies five rebel typologies. “Anti-colonial rebels” fought to end colonial domination. They garnered support through unifying ideologies that galvanized African populations and enlisted international support: nationalism, sovereignty, human rights, and political independence. Focusing on southern Africa, Reno discusses his next grouping, “majority rule rebels,” and their campaigns and activities to eliminate white minority rule regimes in the region. As with anticolonial rebels, external support was important. Like their anticolonial counterparts, majority rule rebels sought to fashion narratives and ideologies that would mute factional and personal differences and inspire loyalty and commitment. Owing to the complexities of regional and domestic politics in southern Africa, majority rule rebels acted within a more localized field of leverage than anticolonial rebels, which hampered their efforts to achieve a unified approach.
Pledging to bring about a “second African liberation,” “reform rebels” personified the anger and frustration over the failures of many postcolonial African governments to live up to their promises and commitments. Reform rebels also worked increasingly in an ideological vacuum as a result of dissatisfaction with ideologies such as modernization or socialism as blueprints for effective governance and development. Erratic international support for reform rebel organizations and burgeoning factionalism among rebel groups meant that rebels’ political survival depended on support within regional and local political networks and conditions. Reno argues that to be successful, reform rebels had to insulate these localized networks from rival rebel groups. Thus reform rebels came to operate in contexts familiar to readers of Jean François Bayart, who notes that “social struggle is a zero sum game where the only prize is the accumulation of power” (The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly, Longman, 1993, 239).
“Warlord and parochial rebels” extend this zero-sum game, and they make up the final categories in Reno’s analysis. These rebels predominate in “failed” states such as Liberia and Sierra Leone in West Africa or Somalia in the Horn of Africa. These environments—where centralized patronage networks are decaying or collapsing—encourage the formation of small, non–ideologically driven armed groups. And as Reno observes in his case study of warlords in Somalia, conflict in these environments produces multiple possible trajectories. Eventual outcomes depend upon the global political context and the nature of statecraft at any given time. Reno has done wonders assembling his materials and helping readers make sense of a multitudinous cast of characters and acronyms. The invaluable list of abbreviations he provides runs to six tightly packed pages!
Elizabeth Schmidt, a historian whose book is also part of the Cambridge series, not only provides a list of essential acronyms; she furnishes comprehensive lists of suggested readings at the end of her chapters. Her book cries for course adoption and complements Reno’s earlier volume. Although Reno focuses mainly on internal actors and dynamics, he is clearly aware of the importance of external actors upon African political trajectories. Similarly, while Schmidt focuses on external impositions and pressures upon African societies, she stresses the salience of internal African dynamics. She does not underplay asymmetries of power between foreign interveners and indigenous actors, but argues that “foreign intervention cannot occur without internal collaboration” (3). Although foreign interventions into African affairs have been decisive at times, she argues that in all instances external actors were responding to internal African dynamics.
Four propositions ballast her book and provide its narrative impetus. The first deals with decolonization processes and traces the ways that both waning European colonial powers and the waxing Cold War tandem of the USSR and the U.S. vied to shape a new order in Africa that would cater to their respective interests. Local issues and struggles became more lethal with longer lasting consequences as a result of the intrusions from Cold War powers and their proxies operating on the ground in Africa. Schmidt’s second proposition looks at the maelstrom of debt, “failed” states, and internal and external competition for resources arising from the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. The War on Terror marks the third proposition. As with its Cold War antecedent, leaders of African regimes found ways to benefit by seeking allegiance with the mostly U.S.-led coalitions conducting the antiterror campaign. Her last proposition is the key point of the book: “Foreign intervention tended to exacerbate rather than alleviate African conflicts and to harm rather than help indigenous populations” (2). She traces convincingly and movingly how “external interests altered the dynamics of internal struggles . . .” and how local conflicts escalated with “devastating effects on African populations” (3).
Schmidt, like Reno, underscores the importance of ideology in helping actors frame their strategies and tactics. She depicts ideology as fluid and situational and shows how easily ideologies become muted, compromised, or abandoned. She also presents a similarly kaleidoscopic mosaic of motivations, aspirations, and contradictions behind foreign interventions in Africa and their interplay with internal African dynamics. For example, even though during the Cold War the United States and the Soviet Union presented African societies with two different development ideologies, superpower practice in Africa was inconsistent. The imperatives of self-interest and the quest to gain influence over and access to African resources often trumped ideology. There have been similar inconsistencies in regard to efforts to reduce terrorism. The United States in particular has formed alliances with unsavory and undemocratic African regimes primarily because these regimes have declared themselves to be antiterrorist. Ideological inconsistency is not confined to the state or government level. It applies across the board. From decolonization to superpower rivalries; to the War on Terror; to NGOs and international organizations imbued with the responsibility to protect; to humanitarian and peacekeeping missions: all are hampered by unclear mandates, misinformation, and conflicts of interest.
Schmidt extends Reno’s analysis with more direct attention to the economic imperatives behind interventions, and she makes the linkages among professed ideologies, actual behavior, and material concerns more explicit. She does not minimize corruption, economic mismanagement, and human rights violations within Africa as destructive factors, but she shows how the colonial and postcolonial positioning of African countries in the global political economy as exporters of low-priced primary commodities exacerbated instability, unrest, and violence. But external appropriation and exploitation are not the only relevant factors. Schmidt acknowledges the importance of regional or intracontinental interventions and how African governments and regional organizations, like their external counterparts, supported warlords, dictators, and dissident movements as part of a struggle for control over politics and resources. For Schmidt, the Scramble for Africa continues, and it is generated by both external and internal actors.
Jeremy Levitt is both a political scientist and an international law jurist. His book is angry, polemical, and exhortative. Among its dedicatees are “the tens of millions of victims of unlawful power sharing in Africa and beyond” (xi). He has written a devastating critique of power-sharing agreements as conflict-resolution and peace-building devices in Africa. Through case studies of Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea-Bissau, Levitt assesses the human rights dimensions of power sharing. He shows how political transitions that compel democratically constituted or legitimate governments to share power with rebels, warlords, and bandits—groups Levitt calls pirates de la loi—not only violate globally recognized human rights norms and values, but also fail to address the primary causes and reasons for conflict. Such agreements neither end conflict nor provide bulwarks for establishing sustainable and just peace. Throughout the book, Levitt hammers his metaphorical gavel to accentuate the critical importance of adhering to legal principles and the democratic rule of law. His three conclusions: peace agreements that are legal and legitimate trump extralegal arrangements fashioned out of perceived political necessity and expedience; legal peace agreements have fewer damaging consequences for African populations; and those responsible for undermining democracy should be prosecuted and barred from power-sharing arrangements.
Levitt proves that human rights norms, respect for the law, and the role of law in imparting legitimacy to governance are not external impositions, but are integral to African legal thought. A great strength of his book is his depiction of what he calls the Neo-Kadeshean Model (NKM) based on the Treaty of Kadesh agreed to over three thousand years ago by King Ramses II of Egypt and King Hattusili III of Hatti. The treaty contains all of the legal principles and practices that Levitt maintains are necessary for resolving African conflicts and establishing a just peace. Levitt argues that the NKM principles established so long ago are “regrettably lacking or nonexistent in Western-orientated models of conflict resolution” (245). One does not have to buy into his “reinvention and reclamation of the international law of antiquity in contemporary international law and theory through the NKM” (247) to accept his point here. Africans have a long and distinguished legal and juridical tradition of their own upon which they can draw. Given his emphasis on indigenous African legal principles and traditions, I was surprised that Levitt makes scant mention of the heritage and variety of African “customary” law and legal procedures and their potential in effecting equitable and sustainable peace outcomes. More examples of indigenous African legal traditions could have reinforced his contentions about the importance of African initiatives and ideas in helping to channel the course of the African future.
In conclusion, I offer a number of points. First, the authors should be commended for undertaking an extremely challenging and difficult task. Short synthetic books are difficult to write. To gain a sophisticated understanding of the histories of so many regions that lie outside one’s own fields of expertise; to present each case concisely, yet not simplistically; to write for a nonspecialist audience, without being reductionist—all take moxie.
Second, while recognizing that Reno’s and Schmidt’s books in particular are synoptic texts targeted for undergraduate and general readers, I wish that all three of the authors had pushed things a bit more. They also have an African audience with whom they must engage. Their books are mostly descriptive and their conclusions could be stronger. They imply, but never offer, prescriptions for resolving the issues that they examine. Reno hopes that his survey will go “at least partway to detecting elements of the present that will write the history of the future” (255). Schmidt opines that there is “no clear path for moving forward” and that “in future debates over foreign involvement, the people of the affected countries set the agenda” (230). Levitt asserts that “rules of law [need to] be binding on peace processes and upheld by peace actors and brokers alike.” But he never goes on to show how to get actors to adhere willfully to these rules and processes. Given that all three of the authors stress African agency, it would not have been remiss for them to posit some concrete programs and agendas for conflict resolution and peace-building. Africanist scholars must offer ideas about ways to address the perennial question: What is to be done? By all means let Africans decide, but at least give them something to decide about!
This brings me to a third brief point about interdisciplinary scholarship. These books embrace a number of discrete academic disciplines, but as is so often the case, interdisciplinary scholarship is more like people hooking up for the night rather than working to sustain a long-lasting relationship. Here is a not altogether fanciful item for my wish list: political scientist Reno, historian Schmidt, and legal scholar Levitt next engage in a collaborative project that would compel them to work through the challenges and opportunities of interdisciplinary work. And perhaps they could address the prescriptive components missing from their individual books.
My fourth point relates to ideology and its relationship to the state. All of the authors stress the importance of “ideology,” but they never really discuss what they mean by the term. Nor do the authors discuss the nature of the African state and its accompanying ideological state apparatuses—those institutions that may be formally outside state control but that serve to transmit state values and prerogatives. We don’t have to go whole-hog Althusserian here, although one could consider, for example, in what ways law and legal institutions may function as hegemonic instruments for maintaining not only social order, but also social stratification. And there is a need to return to thinking about the African state—its presence or its apparent absence—without falling into the reification trap outlined by Pierre Bourdieu, of “being taken over by a thought of the state” (“Rethinking the State: Genesis and Structure of the Bureaucratic Field,” Sociological Theory 12 [1], 1994). As these books show, there is a need to go back to the future and return to topics and ideas that may seem to be old ground and to link these to contemporary African situations. Indeed, Elizabeth Schmidt made a back-to-the-future comment at a roundtable discussion about her book: “In today’s world the histories so apparent a generation ago need to be rediscovered and restored if we are to make sense of current African political structures” (https://networks.h-net.org/h-diplo). Providing linkages between ideology and power and returning to and advancing scholarship on the state in Africa would also help answer the hidden question in all these books: why, given all the reasons to justify a revolution, has there been rebellion but no real transformative revolution in Africa?
Thus to my fifth point: the need to reenergize a scholarly commitment to engage with Africans and listen to what they are saying. Reno, Schmidt, and Levitt write movingly and passionately about African grievances, about African youth, and about the importance of African civil society. They have intellectual, political, and emotional commitments to Africa and African peoples. Yet in these three books African voices are muted. What do Africans think about conflict? How do they define and practice peace? What do they think about ethnicity, class, gender, and other forms of social stratification? How do African notions assume shape and texture in conflictual or pacific contexts and how do these notions influence these contexts? Levitt does point out how the AU Democracy Charter, for example, recognizes “the vital role of women in promoting peace and democracy” (228), but he does not go beyond that assertion. Schmidt recognizes the importance of civil society in informing debates and programs for African futures, but she doesn’t elaborate. And Reno points out tantalizingly but without much amplification possible alternative fields of leverage and sites of innovation that could foster unifying ideologies and narratives for peace and democratic practice.
Recently, I visited my son’s fifth grade class to lead a social studies project on African societies. When we met for the first time we talked about what came to mind when they thought about Africa. The kids mentioned animals, music, and sadly, that Africans fight a lot. But the students also observed that “African women wear colorful clothes and they carry heavy stuff on their heads.” I found this comment intriguing, as it is a reflection of the ways Africans are positioned and position themselves in a number of contexts and how material conditions shape social relationships. But there is a deeper implication, one that Reno, Schmidt, and Levitt and all of us may wish to explore further: it is vital to know not only what Africans are carrying on their heads, but what they are carrying within them.
