Politics of Origin in Africa: Autochthony, Citizenship and Conflict
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Politics of Origin in Africa: Autochthony, Citizenship and Conflict
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Overview
Examining the often complex reasons behind this recent rise of autochthony across a number of high-profile case studies - including the Democratic Republic of Congo, Côte d'Ivoire, Liberia, and Kenya - this is an essential book for anyone wishing to understand the impact of this crucial issue on contemporary African politics and conflicts.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781848139992 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Bloomsbury Publishing |
| Publication date: | 02/14/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 160 |
| File size: | 801 KB |
About the Author
Kevin C. Dunn is an associate professor of political science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, NY, USA. His publications include Imagining the Congo: The international relations of identity (2003), Africa's Challenge to International Relations Theory (with Timothy M. Shaw, 2001), Identity and Global Politics: Theoretical and empirical elaborations (with Patricia Goff, 2004) and African Guerrillas: Raging against the machine (with Morten Bøås, 2007).
Read an Excerpt
Politics of Origin in Africa
Autochthony, Citizenship and Conflict
By Morten Bøås, Kevin Dunn
Zed Books Ltd
Copyright © 2013 Morten Bøås and Kevin DunnAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84813-999-2
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION: CONFLICT, LAND SCARCITY AND TALES OF ORIGIN
People have always been seeking the attachment of belonging to something. This 'something' can be manifested in land, religion, a flag, an institution or anything else that makes us feel more secure and comfortable. Of course, to include is also to exclude, possibly making others insecure for not belonging. As such, there is nothing new in observing that there are clear connections between claims of belonging and conflict. What is new, however, is the context in which these processes are now taking place, a context of nervousness in which the modern state fails to deliver not only employment and social services to its inhabitants, but also basic notions of security. It is not uncommon to note that many modern states are failing to fulfil their expected material functions, but we suggest that they are also failing at the psychic level. The basic societal 'rules of the game' that the state seems intuitively to underpin are being thrown into question. Such a situation helps foster dreams about a past when things were different; when there was not only food on the table, but also order and opportunity. What this leads to is nostalgia; a melancholy for a seemingly lost past. This is the feeling of having lost something; we may not necessarily be able to articulate the feeling very clearly, but it still seems very dear to us. It is a situation of despair, of loss of direction and purpose. And in the midst of this, one searches both to make sense of that loss and to rectify it.
New narratives can arise to meet those needs, providing an explanation and a solution. One powerful narrative is the claim to autochthony. Autochthony implies that one is entitled to belong because of ancestral rights to land. Simply put, the claim is 'this is ours because we were here first'. There is much wrapped up in these claims, such as assumptions about patriarchal practices, understandings of space, the 'natural' privatisation of land, and, most notably, practices of inclusion and exclusion. At their root, these autochthony tales promise to restore that sense of belonging, often by articulating an implicit political agenda. This is what we mean by 'tales of origin as political cleavage'. They are narratives, discursive constructions, that shape perceptions and inform people's actions by linking identity and space in very specific ways. Our focus in this study is how those tales have become manifested in contemporary African cases, often provoking dramatic expressions of political violence. Of course, these developments are not unique to Africa. Peter Geschiere's (2009) recent work Perils of Belonging brilliantly highlights how similar discourses have arisen in both Cameroon and the Netherlands. Conflicts over rights to citizenship, land, employment or state services are not an African phenomenon, but a global development.
The employment of autochthony discourses has become a prominent feature of contemporary politics around the world. Autochthony discourses link identity and space, enabling the speaker to establish a direct claim to territory by asserting that he or she is an original inhabitant, a 'son of the soil'. Autochthony, literally meaning 'emerging from the soil', implies localist forms of belonging, referring to someone with a supposedly indisputable historical link to a particular territory. Its expressions have led to violent struggles in Africa, where assertions of autochthony are used to justify land claims. Indeed, land and autochthony disputes are increasingly the hallmark of political crises in many places on the African continent.
This book, therefore, explores the phenomenon of autochthony in contemporary African politics. The rise of autochthony discourses appears to be a significant aspect of global politics in the current era of globalisation. And while every context is certainly unique, one may well wonder why the employment of autochthony discourses is such a salient feature of so many of today's political conflicts, and why autochthony discourses are so often linked to violence. The rise of exclusionary autochthony discourses in Africa is particularly noteworthy given that, historically, African social formations have generally been characterised by mobility and inclusiveness, with permeable and shifting boundaries. Yet, in recent years, autochthony claims have been part of some of the more striking cases of political violence in Africa. This book combines theoretically oriented chapters that examine the reasons behind the recent rise of autochthony with four chapters that provide in-depth empirical evidence from a handful of case studies from across Africa: Liberia, Kenya, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Côte d'Ivoire. In all four cases, the population has recently suffered grave forms of political violence in which autochthony claims were central, even if the actual word 'autochthony' is not used in the language of violence in Kenya and Liberia.
Resource scarcity and armed conflict
Over the past thirty years, there have been more than seventy wars fought in Africa. While the end of the Cold War initially heralded a decline in armed struggles on the continent, recent years have witnessed an escalation of conflicts that are increasingly violent and protracted. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, sixteen of Africa's fifty-four countries were affected by armed conflict. On the global level, a common factor among war-prone countries is poverty. The poorest one-sixth of humanity endures roughly four-fifths of the world's civil wars. Many scholars believe that the strong correlation between conflict and poverty needs to be explained. Attention is often paid to the structural causes of deep inequality, the impact of unequal growth, and, increasingly, the unequal distribution of resources.
Recent scholarship has suggested that conflicts in Africa are caused by environmental scarcity and/or economic predation. While there is much to glean from some of this research, we tend to find the analyses wanting, if not misguided. Research, dubbed 'Malthusian' or 'neo-Malthusian' by proponents and critics alike, has explored the relationship between conflict and resource scarcity. Perhaps the most notable author attached to this approach has been Thomas Homer-Dixon, who has proposed that six kinds of environmental scarcity could potentially produce violent conflict: 1) greenhouse effect; 2) stratosphere ozone depletion; 3) degradation and loss of good agricultural land; 4) degradation and removal of forests; 5) depletion and pollution of fresh water supplies; and 6) depletion of fisheries (Homer-Dixon 1994). Homer-Dixon and others have argued that Africa will be particularly susceptible to these forces, given that African states lack 'adaptive capacity' (Homer-Dixon and Blitt 1998: 9). The claim is that economically poor states, which lack both financial and human capital and are ethnically diverse, are less likely to be able to manage the severe environmental challenges that lead to scarcity.
Homer-Dixon's work suggests three hypotheses linking conflict with environmental scarcity. First, it is suggested that decreasing supplies of physically controllable resources would provoke interstate 'simple scarcity' conflicts or 'resource wars'. For example, Michael Klare (2001) has asserted that competition for and control over critical natural resources will be the guiding principles behind the use of military force in the twenty-first century. Second, large population movements caused by environment stress might induce 'group identity' conflicts such as ethnic clashes. Third, severe environmental scarcity would simultaneously increase economic deprivation and disrupt social institutions, namely the state, and cause deprivation conflicts that would be reflected in civil strife and insurgency (Homer-Dixon 1999). For Homer-Dixon and like-minded thinkers, scarcity will be caused by increased demand due to population growth or by increased consumption, and by decreased supply due to erosion, degradation and/or unequal access and distribution (ibid.: 280). It is Homer-Dixon's contention that scarcity will lead to resource capture by those with the means to do this, and environmental marginalisation of those without means.
It should be noted at the outset that the degree of causality given to environmental factors has varied across Homer-Dixon's published record. Indeed, Homer-Dixon has stepped away from making grand causal claims about the links between resource scarcity and violent conflict. In 1999, he concluded that:
environmental scarcity is not sufficient, by itself, to cause violence; when it does contribute to violence, research shows, it always interacts with other political, economic, and social factors. Environmental scarcity's causal role can never be separated from these contextual factors, which are often unique to the society in question. (ibid.: 178)
In 2012, the prestigious Journal of Peace Research published a special issue on climate change and conflict that challenged a number of 'Malthusian' assumptions, yet causal connections between scarcity and conflict continue to be forwarded by some. A number of writers have been alarmist in their pronouncements and more grandiose in their causal claims. Robert Kaplan (1994), for example, provocatively proclaims that resource scarcity in Africa and elsewhere is directly linked to warfare and increased human misery, with direct implications for the global North.
A number of scholars have expanded on Homer-Dixon's hypotheses regarding 'simple scarcity' conflicts or 'resource wars'. Paul Collier (2000; 2007), for example, has analysed the economic reasons underlying civil wars over the past forty years and concludes that economic greed and control over scarce resources are far stronger explanatory factors than grievance. The works by Collier and others often imply that all African wars are resource wars, fought not over political issues but in order to gain access to profits (see Collier 2000; Berdal and Malone 2000; Klare 2001). Much of this literature argues that changes in the global economy have helped foster the rise of so-called 'new wars' (see Kaldor 1999; Duffield 2001). The argument is that changes in the global economy, particularly the increased interconnectedness of certain markets, have provided new opportunities for African guerrilla movements. Such approaches often mistakenly assume that theft and predation are the reasons for the conflict. While we recognise the complex ways in which African guerrilla movements have been exploiting opportunities provided to them by changes in the global political economy, we reject explanations of African armed struggles that focus primarily on the supposed economic agendas of these actors (Bøås and Dunn 2007). Such a myopic focus may help explain how some conflicts are sustained, but it rarely tells us much about why conflicts start in the first place. Likewise, 'Malthusian' arguments that suggest a causal connection between resource scarcity and conflict tend to conflate environmental circumstances with political strategies.
Land and conflict in Africa
Our concern in this book is how the concept of autochthony in the form of tales of origin is deployed in contemporary African conflicts. As we will see, autochthony claims are intimately connected to disputes over land and access to land. While we are concerned with how struggles over a scarce resource such as land are related to armed conflict, we want to be clear that we do not share the assumptions made by the 'neo-Malthusian' and 'resource wars' approaches mentioned above. In general, we think these approaches are fundamentally misguided. For us, it is a political, not environmental or economic, issue. But it behoves us to consider these arguments concerning environmental scarcity in order to get the relationship between land and conflict right.
Approaches that make causal links between scarcity and violent conflict have been strongly challenged by other scholars. Already in the mid-1970s Ester Boserup (1976) exposed some of the problems with the neo-Malthusian approach. As these kinds of theories tend to assume that a given environment has a certain carrying capacity for the human population, they also suggest that, if this point of equilibrium is exceeded, hunger, environmental disaster or conflict will follow until a new equilibrium is reached. The problem with this kind of reasoning, according to Boserup, is that two important factors were ignored. First, these theories focused only on the technology of food production, thus ignoring other types of technological change; and secondly, they ignored the effects of demographic change on both environment and technology. Both technological and institutional innovation could lead societies out of the nightmarish Malthusian scenario, and, as we will see in the case of Liberia and Côte d'Ivoire, local rural populations have responded to the influx of new inhabitants on their territory with various techniques of social engineering. However, these cases also illustrate that social compromises, once made, can also break down and lead to conflict, but there is no immediate or direct link between increased population pressure and conflict. Building on the pioneering work of Boserup and others, there is therefore currently a sizeable weight of scholarly literature that suggests that environmental change rarely causes conflict directly and only occasionally does so indirectly (Kahl 2006; Derman et al. 2007).
Scholars have also pointed out that the reasons for war are usually independent of environmental disruptions such as scarcity, and thus one should be cautious in inferring a simple relationship between increased environmental scarcity and warfare. Lietzmann and Vest (1999: 40), for example, have illustrated that environmental stress need not lead to direct violence. The conflict in Darfur, Sudan has been offered by some neo-Malthusians as an example of a war driven by environmental conditions, namely the drought-related problems the region has suffered for decades. Darfur has been regarded by some as 'the world's first climate change war', as it was dubbed by a 2007 UN Environment Programme report. Yet many scholars have been quick to point out that the origins of conflict are far more complex than this catchy epithet suggests. As Alex de Waal (2007) notes:
In all cases, significant violent conflict erupted because of political factors, particularly the propensity of the Sudan government to respond to local problems by supporting militia groups as proxies to suppress any signs of resistance. Drought, famine and the social disruptions they brought about made it easier for the government to pursue this strategy.
Looking at the examples of violence in Tanzania, Kenya, Burkina Faso and Zimbabwe, Derman, Odgaard and Sjaastad (2007) found that 'none support the direct link between resource scarcity and violence – in each case a mixture of social inequality, lack of secure land rights, a history of conflicts and the use of land as a political reward' was responsible for conflict taking off. But they also noted that 'tense and volatile situations provide opportunities for manipulation of identities, particularly where land is concerned'.
While we tend to regard neo-Malthusian assumptions and causal claims more than a little problematic, they do raise important considerations about the role of scarce resources, such as land, in the development of armed conflicts. Citing such examples as Burundi, Côte d'Ivoire, Rwanda and Zimbabwe, the World Bank acknowledged in its 2003 report Land Policies for Growth and Poverty Reduction that 'deprivation of land rights as a feature of more generalized inequality in access to economic opportunities and low economic growth have caused seemingly minor social or political conflicts to escalate into large-scale conflicts'. Furthermore, in its work on Helping Prevent Violent Conflict, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) notes the significance of land-related sources of conflict. It notes that one of the primary causes of political destabilisation – population displacement – is often the result of land dispossession. It also suggests that scarcity of productive land and changes in land tenure systems are contributing factors to violent conflict. Moreover, it notes that any successful post-conflict resolution cannot be effective unless it resolves land-related disputes and ensures that demobilised ex-combatants are able to gain access to land (quoted in Huggins and Clover 2005: 4).
The centrality of land in African societies should not be downplayed. In a continent that remains overwhelmingly agricultural, land continues to lie at the heart of social, economic and political life in most of Africa. There also remains a lack of clarity regarding property rights in contemporary Africa, and land tenure continues to be deeply contested on much of the continent. It should be noted that land remains important not only for farming purposes but also as a speculative asset. As such, it is a highly political, and politicised, resource. As Calestous Juma (1996) observed:
The way land use is governed is not simply an economic question, but also a critical aspect of the management of political affairs. It may be argued that the governance of land use is the most important political issue in most African countries.
For us, land and land tenure are important political issues in Africa. But the extent to which they are related to armed conflict depends on the extent to which they are politicised. Attempts to connect land and identity through autochthony discourses are, first and foremost, political strategies, and we treat them as such.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Politics of Origin in Africa by Morten Bøås, Kevin Dunn. Copyright © 2013 Morten Bøås and Kevin Dunn. Excerpted by permission of Zed Books Ltd.
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Table of Contents
1. Introduction: conflict, land scarcity and tales of origin2. Autochthony, melancholy and uncertainty in contemporary African politics
3. Liberia: civil war and the 'Mandingo question'
4. Kenya: majimboism, indigenous land claims and electoral violence
5. Democratic Republic of Congo: 'dead certainty' in North Kivu
6. Côte d'Ivoire: production and the politics of belonging
7. Conclusion