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Why are some African countries trapped in vicious cycles of ethnic
exclusion and civil war, while others experience relative peace? In
this groundbreaking book, Philip Roessler addresses this question.
Roessler models Africa's weak, ethnically-divided states as
confronting rulers with a coup-civil war trap - sharing power with
ethnic rivals is necessary to underwrite societal peace and prevent
civil war, but increases rivals' capabilities to seize sovereign
power in a coup d'etat. How rulers respond to this strategic
trade-off is shown to be a function of their country's ethnic
geography and the distribution of threat capabilities it produces.
Moving between in-depth case studies of Sudan and the Democratic
Republic of the Congo based on years of field work and statistical
analyses of powersharing, coups and civil war across sub-Saharan
Africa, the book serves as an exemplar of the benefits of mixed
methods research for theory-building and testing in comparative
politics.
In October 1996, a motley crew of ageing Marxists and unemployed
youth coalesced to revolt against Mobutu Seso Seko, president of
Zaire/Congo since 1965. The rebels of the AFDL marched over 1500km
in seven months to crush the dictatorship, heralding liberation as
a second independence for Central Africa as a whole. US President
Bill Clinton toasted AFDL leader Laurent-Desire Kabila and his
regional allies - having developed a unique camaraderie and
personal trust on the region's battlefronts -- as a 'new generation
of African leaders' ushering in an 'African Renaissance.' Within
months, however, the Pan-Africanist alliance fell apart. The AFDL's
collapse triggered a cataclysmic fratricide between the heroes of
liberationthat became the deadliest conflict since the Second World
War, drawing in eight African countries. This book draws on
hundreds of interviews with protagonists from Africa and the
international community to offer a novel theoretical and empirical
account of Africa's Great War. Bridging the gap between comparative
politics and international relations, it argues that the renewed
outbreak of calamitous violence in August 1998 was a function of
the kind of regime the AFDL was and how its leaders saw Congo,
theregion and themselves. As a Pan-Africanist liberation movement,
the collapse of the AFDL government internally and the unravelling
of regional order externally were inextricably linked.
Why are some African countries trapped in vicious cycles of ethnic
exclusion and civil war, while others experience relative peace? In
this groundbreaking book, Philip Roessler addresses this question.
Roessler models Africa's weak, ethnically-divided states as
confronting rulers with a coup-civil war trap - sharing power with
ethnic rivals is necessary to underwrite societal peace and prevent
civil war, but increases rivals' capabilities to seize sovereign
power in a coup d'etat. How rulers respond to this strategic
trade-off is shown to be a function of their country's ethnic
geography and the distribution of threat capabilities it produces.
Moving between in-depth case studies of Sudan and the Democratic
Republic of the Congo based on years of field work and statistical
analyses of powersharing, coups and civil war across sub-Saharan
Africa, the book serves as an exemplar of the benefits of mixed
methods research for theory-building and testing in comparative
politics.
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