Conflict in Africa: Concepts and Realities

by Adda Bruemmer Bozeman

Overview

Do modern Western ideas about the nature of conflict and its resolution apply to Africa? To answer this question, Adda Bozeman examines conflict in Africa south of the Sahara in its many social, political, and cultural aspects, past and present.

The author shows how African perspectives on war and diplomacy have evolved under the influence of nonliteracy, tribalism, and a concept of undifferentiated time. In addition, she confirms that indigenous cultural traditions are resurgent everywhere, making it unlikely that African political values will become more closely aligned with those of the West. The two civilizations view conflict differently and have different ways of resolving it. The Africans are more at ease with conflict than their Western counterparts, and they do not see war and peace as the mutually exclusive phenomena that Occidental societies hold them to be. The author concludes that modern Western concepts of conflict not only do not, but cannot, allow for African realities.

Originally published in 1976.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691644356
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	04/19/2016
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #1650
Pages:	446
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.00(d)

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Conflict in Africa

Concepts and Realities

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By Adda B. Bozeman

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1976 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-10044-9

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CHAPTER 1

NORMS, VALVES, AND REALITIES

The word "conflict" has multiple ranges of reference and meaning in the vocabularies of the West. On the plane of biography it usually stands for inner stress and tension, as when the self evolves from childhood and dependency; when choices between rival moral challenges or courses of social action have to be made; or when competitive ideas intrude upon the mental process of seeking certainty and truth. Indeed, it is hardly possible to appreciate the stream of scientific discoveries, artistic inventions, or philosophical theories carried by this culture without realizing that each represents the resolution of conflicting principles, and that most have issued from individual lives that were fraught with numerous kinds of conflict, insecurity, and risk. For the preferred human type that emerges from the records has typically been the striving, suffering individual, pitted against destiny, the gods, or nature, defiant of authority and tradition, at odds with inner daemons, yet determined to bring harmony into life and thought by composing his personality and ordering the environment.

The norms traditionally accepted for the conduct of interpersonal relations and the organization of society reflect this ideal image of human destiny. The theme of the adversary, the counterplayer, or the opposite is thus everywhere affirmed — in the school house, the stadium, and the market place, the court room no less than the parliament. It rules modes of reasoning, discourse, and disputation such as the Platonic dialogue or the legal brief ; provides the measure of success and failure in competitive enterprises, bargaining proceedings, and elections, and may thus be recognized as the sine qua non in all collisions of interest, clashes of will, and contests of physical and intellectual skill. In short, the civilization affirms conflict between groups and persons as a corollary of individual liberty, and therefore accommodates it also as an attribute of organized political life. On this level, as on that of biography, however, conflict is valued not so much as an end in itself but rather as a process that serves to clarify issues in dispute and narrow areas of contention so as to induce some measure of ultimate conciliation or accord. Furthermore, while the need for opposition is affirmed, it is yet kept subject to the quest for harmony and balance. This value preference explains why the European imagination has fastened itself, especially from the age of the Renaissance onward, to the twin images of the balanced personality and the balanced state; why the language of politics in this culture is so rich in metaphoric allusions to the notion of an equilibrium; and why, by contrast, imbalance, whether in bookkeeping and trade, in the interrelationship of different governing bodies, or the coexistence of separate states, has so of ten been viewed as a deviation from the norm.

The records of Occidental theory and history thus relay a cultural consensus to the effect that obdurate hostility or aggressiveness in interpersonal relations is abnormal, and that continued social conflict is incompatible with the purposes of civilized society. Above all, they are found to converge upon a common fear of violence. Overt and covert, verbal and behavioral manifestations of conflict have therefore customarily been kept within definite bounds, set either by generally shared moral precepts, special rules of the game, or prescriptions emanating from governing authorities. And among these latter institutions, again, none has been as important as the law. Each category of conflict in the domains of both private and public affairs is thus found allied with a cluster of controlling norms, rules, and sanctions in terms of which it has been possible, for example, to delimit permissible from impermissible modes of voicing grievances and settling discords; to deter or punish injuries to life and property; to isolate threatening mental dispositions or conspiracies to disrupt society, and to narrow irreconcilable positions to the dimensions of justiciable controversies so as to render them capable of resolution by a court of law. Furthermore, the various legal orders in the jurisdictions of the civil and the common law stress the notion of agreement by providing contractual forms for the approximation of consensus between contending parties, as well as constitutional processes of government (such as representative assemblies) in which regulated debate is expected to transpose factional discord into compromise or unity.

No century comes to mind in which these understandings and arrangements have not been found deficient, or in which the fabric of an Occidental state has not been torn by civil discontent or violent strife. But such occurrences do not seem to have undermined the general belief that the search for harmony is a necessary undertaking, and that conflicts in private and public life can be effectively muted, managed, or resolved by resort to orderly processes of change. Peace within the morally and politically unified society has thus been traditionally experienced not only as a supreme value but also as a distinct, definable, and attainable social condition.

The norms and expectations with which the conduct of interstate relations was associated before the twentieth century were similar to, but not analogous with, the principles that had shaped the inner order. The history of the culturally unified European world thus instructs us that conflicts of national interest were commonly postulated as inherent in the very notion of political unity and independence, and that violence in the form of war was accepted as a legitimate, morally defensible mode of resolving conflicts that could not be composed by other means. Reflecting on the records of Classical, Jewish, and Christian thought and action as he had assembled them in the seventeenth century, when the outlines of the so-called modern European states system were becoming apparent, Grotius thus concluded that war per se is not condemned either by the voluntary law of nations or by the law of nature; that states, not unlike individuals, can reduce each other to subjection, and by this means acquire a civil, absolute, or mixed dominion; that the boundaries of states and kingdoms, or nations and cities, can of ten be settled by the laws of war; that wars, for the attainment of their objects, must employ force and terror as their most proper agents; and that the grounds of war are as numerous as those of judicial actions. "For where the power of Jaw ceases, there war begins."

Enduring international peace, by contrast, is presented by this pioneering theorist of international law as a remote condition. The prophesy of Isaiah, who says the time shall come "when nations shall beat their swords into plow-shares, and turn their spears into pruning hooks," and when "nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more," is thus in his opinion inconclusive and irrelevant insofar as the justice of war is concerned, since it alludes to the state of the world that would take place only if all nations would submit to the law of Christ. Pending the consummation of this utopian dream, peace is perforce limited in time and space. A significant passage suggests, in fact, that it may not always be easy to distinguish clearly between war and peace, or to assert that every war must end; for war, Grotius notes, is a name for a situation that can exist even when warlike operations are not being carried on. Belligerent powers may thus agree on still points or truces in the intercourse of war. There is, however, no uniform period fixed for the continuance of such an arrangement, which one of his classical authorities describes as "a transitory peace, in travail with war"; "and I shall add," Grotius writes, "that they [truces] are made too for years, twenty, thirty, forty, even a hundred years." In other words, conflict or belligerency may well be semipermanent or protracted.

These findings and propositions, which were to be fully borne out in the ensuing centuries by the realities of inter-European relations, are presented in close alliance with two other major themes, also destined to remain dominant in the civilization: the reference on the one hand to law, on the other to ethics.

The weight of the argument in The Rights of War and Peace is carried by the thesis that law inheres in each mode of conducting international intercourse, whether circumscribed as peace, war, truce, or neutrality, and that states ought to be bound by the rules that go with the situation in which they find themselves. Law should thus inform a government of the circumstances that make war just and necessary; what the privileges and obligations are, alike of the victor, the vanquished, and the neutral; when reprisals and punishments are called for; how prisoners, inoffensive civilians, ambassadors, and other categories of persons are to be treated; and just which formalities are requisite if war is to be properly initiated or brought to a close. Although the provisions under each of these-and numerous other law-related headings — are quite explicit, they are derived almost exclusively from norms established by the Greeks and Romans, notably those embodied in the Roman civil law concerning property and contract. That is to say, this foremost text of the law of nations, upon which all subsequent manuals are based, is in its most significant respects an internationalization of the law governing the conduct of natural persons in certain politically unified European societies.

All European systems of legal norms, ancient and modern, are inseparably linked to prevalent ethical values. It was, therefore, entirely logical for Grotius and his followers to posit a like connection between values and norms for the operation of an inter-European body of law. References to justice, conscience, the Christian "law" of charity, moderation, and above all, good faith thus pervade the work, providing the sinews, as it were, for the integrity and sustenance of the projected jural framework. For example, the text is dominated by the assumption that good faith, being the mortar by which all governments are bound together, will be the keystone also for the unity of the larger society of nations, and this in times of peace as well as in times of war. Taking issue with the views of some of the Ancients, among them Plutarch, who noted that most powers "employ the relative situations of peace and war, as a current specie, for the purchase of whatever they deem expedient," Grotius also warns against undue resort to feints, deceptions, and dissimulations. Furthermore, he insists that treaties, even between hostile powers, must be founded upon good faith, expressed or tacit, since it is by such pledges alone that peace can be concluded or the rights of war enforced; that peace must be kept on whatever terms it has been made; that states must guard against rashly engaging in war, even when the grounds are just, and that they should practice moderation in acquiring dominion or despoiling the country of the enemy when engaged in combat.

It is in the context of this culturally shared value system, then, that nations are expected to keep alive the hope of peace even in the midst of war; find the "usual and practical topics of negotiation," and to practice arbitration in strict accordance with the rules of justice -in short, to find pacific means of resolving conflicts that do not justify belligerent action.

Post-Grotian generations up to the middle of the twentieth century have held rather steadfastly to the major themes as they had been summarized in the seventeenth century. That is to say, war continued to be a legitimate instrument of statecraft, but its conduct remained subject to rules, and its place in international politics, strategic doctrine, and value theory was strictly circumscribed. Clausewitz (b. 1780), who laid the basis for the systematic study of war as a field of human knowledge, composed his work On War after Europe had been subjected to decades of warfare in the Napoleonic period; he restated Grotius in defining war as a conduct of political intercourse by other means, a form of human enterprise belonging to social existence, and a conflict of great interests that is settled by bloodshed. Although his special concern was quite different from the task Grotius had set for himself, being mainly addressed to the question of whether such a conflict of living elements is subject to general laws, and if so, whether these can serve as a guide to action, he too inveighed against the folly of viewing war as an act of unrestrained violence, a mere passion for daring and winning, or "an independent thing in itself." To Clausewitz it was quite clear that war is a serious means to a serious end, only a part of political intercourse, and therefore always subject to the political design. And the latter, whether understood as referring to a particular foreign policy or to the realm of politics in general, is here decidedly not viewed as "war by other means" — a theoretical construction in the communist doctrine of conflict that Lenin elaborated several decades later when he stood Clausewitz "on his head." Indeed, the modern histories of diplomacy and the law of nations point persuasively to the conclusion that conflict-related thought and politics in the West continued to favor the rule of law and peace, even though they also bear out Clausewitz' conclusion that "peace seldom reigns over all Europe, and never in all quarters of the world."

These approaches to conflict and war in international relations are organically related to the preferred cultural style on the level of social relations within the state. Common legacies of domestic law and government made for a value system that instructed diplomats and political representatives, as well as their domestic constituencies, to believe, first, that international quarrels, whether acute or lingering, should be settled if at all possible; second, that governments and their agents will do so most successfully when they resort to the methods of discussion and negotiation customary in domestic constitutional processes; and third, that intergovernmental accords are best entrusted to the type of document used for registering interpersonal compacts. In other words, since individuals are presumed capable of making promises and abiding by commitments, states, too, are held to compliance with such norms. The law of treaties, which constitutes the core of modern international law, could therefore evolve logically as an international extension of the Western law of contract.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Conflict in Africa by Adda B. Bozeman. Copyright © 1976 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents

• Frontmatter, pg. i
• MAPS, pg. vi
• PREFACE, pg. ix
• CONTENTS, pg. xiii
• 1. Norms, Values, And Realities, pg. 3
• 2. Cultural Diversity, The Varieties Of Conflict, And Occidental Designs Of Unity, pg. 13
• 3. Patterns of Conflict and Accord, pg. 23
• 4. The Norms of Conflict Theory and the Facts of Cultural Consciousness, pg. 46
• 5. Nonliterate Thought and Communication, pg. 69
• 6. Mythical Vision, History, And Society, pg. 100
• 7. States, Empires, And The Folk Society, pg. 118
• 8. Design And Definition, pg. 143
• 9. Order And Disorder As Functions Of Magic, Power, And Death, pg. 149
• 10. Fear And The Killing Power Of The Spoken Word, pg. 155
• 11. Verbal Aggression And The Muting Of Tensions, pg. 166
• 12. Occult Games, pg. 177
• 13. Ritual Violence And The Cause Of Government, pg. 180
• 14. War And Political Identity In Inter-African Relations, pg. 201
• 15. Analysis Versus Existence, pg. 214
• 16. The Legal Vocabulary And The Social Reality, pg. 227
• 17. The Healing Power Of The Word, pg. 239
• 18. The Role of Intermediaries, pg. 259
• 19. Commerce, Communication, And Statecraft In Inter-African Relations, pg. 304
• 20. The European Presence, Treaty Making, And The African Response, pg. 331
• Conflict and Conciliation: Some Concluding Perspectives, pg. 369
• Index of Ethnic and Linguistic Groups Mentioned in the Text, pg. 373
• Bibliography of Sources Cited, pg. 383
• Index, pg. 417