Violence in Contemporary Africa

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African Affairs, 104/417, 685695 doi:10.1093/afraf/adi072

The Author [2005]. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Royal African Society. All rights reserved

Advance Access Publication 23 September 2005

REVIEW ARTICLE

VIOLENCE IN CONTEMPORARY AFRICA

REASSESSED

MARKLEOPOLD

Violence, edited by Neil L. Whitehead. Oxford: James Currey and Santa Fe: SAR

Press (School of American Research Advanced Seminar Series), 2005. 306 pp.45.00 hardback. ISBN 0-85255-973-9 (hardback); 16.95 paperback. ISBN0-85255-972-0 (paperback).

Violence and Belonging: The quest for identity in post-colonial Africa,edited by Vigdis Broch-Due. London and New York: Routledge, 2005. x + 261 pp.$110.00 hardback. ISBN 0-415-29006-6 (hardback); $36.95 paperback. ISBN0-415-29007-4 (paperback).

No Peace, No War: An anthropology of contemporary armed conflicts,

edited by Paul Richards. Oxford: James Currey and Athens: Ohio University Press,2005. x + 214 pp. 45.00 hardback. ISBN 0-85255-936-4 (hardback); 16.95paperback. ISBN 0-85255-935-6 (paperback).

Shadows of War: Violence, power, and international profiteering in thetwenty-first century, by Carolyn Nordstrom. Berkeley, CA: University of CaliforniaPress, 2004. xii + 306 pp. $24.50 hardback. ISBN 0-520-23977-6 (hardback);$9.46 paperback. ISBN 0-520-24241-6 (paperback).

Vanguard or Vandals: Youth, politics and conflict in Africa, edited by JonAbbink and Ineke van Kessel. Leiden: Brill, 2005. ix + 300 pp. $46.00 paperback.

ISBN 90 04 14275 4 (paperback).

Child Soldier, by China Keitetsi. London: Souvenir Press, 2004. xiii + 274 pp.

13.29 hardback. ISBN 0-285-63690-1 (hardback).

THEBOOKSLISTEDABOVE represent the latest wave in a rising flood tide of

academic work on violence and warfare in the post-Cold War era. This

interdisciplinary field of study involves historians, economists, political sci-

entists, psychologists, sociologists and many others, but social and cultural

anthropologists have been increasingly prominent in the discussions, and

the present books are predominantly by anthropologists. The sad centrality


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of Africa in this burgeoning academic debate is demonstrated by the fact

that, excluding general theoretical chapters, the edited collections under

consideration that are notexclusively concerned with Africa devote six out often case studies (Richards), and four out of nine case studies (Whitehead)

to African examples. Nordstroms book too, while ostensibly global in its

reach, in fact concentrates largely on Africa. Moreover, if Africa dominates

the debate on violence, Africanists know that studies of violence in its

many forms are increasingly prominent in the study of Africa. It seems a

timely moment to try to assess the contribution of this literature to our

understanding of violence and warfare in contemporary Africa.

Much of the late twentieth-century literature on new wars1 was con-

cerned with finding a predominant root cause of all or most conflicts.Richards offers a useful typology of these theories

Malthus with guns, the view that war is ultimately caused by competi-

tion over scarce resources.2

New Barbarism, the idea that the end of the Cold War unleashed long-

suppressed ethnic hatreds, leading to inevitable and insoluable conflicts

(especially in Africa and the Balkans) and setting the stage for a new reli-

gious-based cold war between Christendom (plus Judaism) and Islam.3

Greed, Not Grievance, the theory that economic motivations lie behind

all wars.4

Richards demonstrates the inadequacies of all of these approaches as

monocausal explanations but, quite rightly, he does not suggest that they

are entirely without merit. It is clearly true that competition over scare nat-

ural resources, the possibilities of economic gain for some and the histori-

cal circumstances of the US superpower monopoly in the post-Soviet

world (changing, as it has, the possibilities of international support for one

side or another in local conflicts) are all factors in most, if not in all con-

temporary conflicts. But they do not separately, or even together, seem to

explain very much about why wars start, continue or stop, nor about the

relationship between social and interpersonal violence, why particular

1. The phrase is that of the political scientist Mary Kaldor,New and Old Wars: Organisedviolence in a global era (Polity Press, Cambridge, 1999).2. Associated with the work of T. F. Homer-Dixon, Environment, Scarcity and Violence(Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1999).3. Associated with the American journalist Robert Kaplan, The Ends of the Earth: A journeyat the end of the twentieth century (Random House, New York, 1996), and the veteran USpolitical scientist Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of theWorld Order(Simon and Schuster, New York, 1997).

4. Two of the more sophisticated versions of this approach, discussed by Richards, are thoseof David Keen, The Benefits of Famine: Political economy of famine and relief in southwesternSudan,1983-1989(Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1994) and Whos it between?E h i d i l i l i Ti All d J S ( d ) Th M di f


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VIOLENCEINCONTEMPORARYAFRICA 687

conflicts take particular forms or why some participate and others do not,

among many other issues raised in the books discussed here.

Richardss own preferred approach is a fourth, the ethnographic perspective,which turns out to mean that new war needs to be understood in rela-

tion to patterns of violence already embedded within society and to be

studied through the ethnography of practice (Richards, ed., p. 11). This

is, of course the way that anthropologists (and some historians and others)

have long studied war and violence, and perhaps such specific, careful

studies of particular cases are the only way to approach an understanding

of the subject. Others, however, still yearn for a general theory of violence.

Whitehead goes so far as to argue that

[V]aluable though such calls for ethnographies of violence are, they become credible

only if such ethnographies are searching for the kinds of explanations that make viol-

ence intelligible. It is all too easy to suggest that violence itself, as a negation of reason

or intelligibilitycannot be so understood, and we are left to merely portray the par-

ticular in the expectation that actual explanation will somehow follow. But this kind

of intimacy then invites the charges that such ethnographic interest itself appears as

prurient, as a species of journalism that may tend to augment the performance of viol-

ence, not inhibit it.5

This begs a number of questions. One set concerns the notion of intelligi-

bility; in what or whose terms does violence become intelligible? Those ofa Western rationalist or empiricist philosophical tradition? Or is it possible

for the ethnographer to explain (perhaps within such a tradition) the motiva-

tions and ideas of those with very different cultural assumptions (as E. E.

Evans-Pritchard famously attempted in his work on witchcraft)? These are

questions with which anthropologists have long grappled. Another set of rel-

evant questions concerns how ethnographic work can or should be carried out

in a war situation.6 It is noticeable that many of the chapters in the edited

collections under consideration offer informed commentaries on, or cultural

analysis of, violent events, rather than detailed ethnographic accounts of theprocesses involved (in this context, the one non-academic book under dis-

cussion, Keitetsis autobiography, offers a level of engagement and detail

lacking in the more rigorous accounts of the anthropologists).

Where Whitehead, Richards, Broch-Due and many of the other writers

considered here agree,7 is in their view that violence cannot, as some of the

5. Whitehead (ed.), pp. 56-7.6. Elsewhere, I have taken issue with Alex de Waals rhetorical question, How would asocial anthropologist participate in a war? By shooting people? By being shot?; [Alex de Waal,

Famine that Kills: Darfur, Sudan, 1984-1985(Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1989), p. 3].

My somewhat flippant response was that the anthropologist participates by doing what mostpeople around are doing; trying to avoid being shot (Leopold, Inside West Nile; violence, historyand representation on an African Frontier Oxford James Currey; Santa Fe School of American


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theories of the 1990s suggested, be seen as something deviant from or out-

side normal, peaceful society, but has to be understood aspartof society,

as embedded in history and culture. This, again, is a venerable anthropolog-ical argument, but it is also another one stressed in the current wave of liter-

ature on violence. Where Richardss collection is particularly interesting is in

its reverse twist to this argument, in showing peace as an analytically more

problematic, and socially much rarer phenomenon than war.8

The first problem with understanding violence, one that is grappled with

but not solved by several of the books under consideration, is that of defi-

nition. As Whitehead points out, there has been a traditional disjuncture

between

[T]he disciplinary scholarship practiced by theorists of war and those theorizing viol-

ence, usually from interpersonal or domestic/marital situations. In the latter case, psy-

chology and sociology have produced a large literature. In the former, political

scientists and economists are notably active.9

Anthropologists have increasingly tried to find definitions that show the

links as well as the obvious differences between the two kinds of violence.

Although Broch-Due claims that her edited collection makes a novel con-

tribution to social theoryin its exploration of the precise linkages

between wider regional upheavals and the routinised forms of violence in

everyday life (p. 2), this theme has been relatively common in recent liter-

ature and is shared by the editorial approach of the Whitehead volume and

by Nordstroms work, as well as much other recent work on violence.10 As

Whitehead writes, however,

[V]iolence is often referenced as an immediate interpersonal relationship, leading to

an emphasis on the phenomenological experience of violence by victim and perpetra-

tor. This focus on the interpersonal therefore tends to exclude not only the structur-

ing factors of society, culture and history but ipso facto the whole domain of warfare

and military action, which places much emphasis on a depersonalization of the

enemy. It is hard to see how approaches that begin in the psychodynamics of inter-personal aggression can ever adequately conceptualize the organized, collective

expression of violence over time that is military action or war. To some extent, these

differences in approach show an undercurrent of counterposing humanistic to social

scientific explanation, which is further reflected in orientations to issues of either

identity or experience as the focus for understanding respectively war and violence.11

8. See, e.g. Sverker Finnstrom, Northern Uganda in Richards (ed.)9. Whitehead (ed.), p. 56.

10. See, e.g. Veena Das, Arthur Kleinman, Mamphela Ramphele and Pamela Reynolds(eds), Violence and Subjectivity (University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 2000); VeenaDas Arthur Kleinman Margaret Lock Mamphela Ramphele and Pamela Reynolds (eds)


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Many of the contributors to Broch-Dues edited collection do focus on

identity (seen, in this context, as more or less synonymous with ethnicity)

in this way. In her introduction, she speaks of the emergence and elusivematrix of violence and identity politics in modern Africa.12 But if ethnic-

ity or identity is defined (as much contemporary anthropology tends to

define it) in terms of a shifting set of techniques for boundary mainten-

ance, some of which may take violent forms, then such an emphasis on

identity becomes circular as a wider explanation of war and violence (as

opposed to a specific problematic in particular cases, where it may operate

as one element in historical or ethnographic explanation).

Definitions are important in understanding such a complex set of issues

as those raised by the notion of violence. The most widely used anthropo-logical definition of violence, cited as such by Broch-Due, Richards and

Whitehead, is that developed in David Richess 1986 edited collection, The

Anthropology of Violence,13 described by Whitehead as [u]ndoubtedly, the

most influential current definition of violence.14 Richess definition of viol-

ence is based on a triangular relationship between perpetrator (or per-

former), witness (or observer) and victim, where violence means an

act of physical hurt deemed legitimate by the performer and illegitimate by

(some) witnesses (p. 8). This means that the performance of violence is

inherently likely to be contested on the question of legitimacy (Riches,p. 11). This has the virtue of being applicable to both political and inter-

personal violence. Whatever its analytical value, however (and I outline

some criticisms below), such a definition, as Whitehead suggests (p. 57),

does not get us very far in understanding violence, even when the three

points of the triangle are explicitly defined to include social groups as well

as individuals. This is the approach taken by Stewart and Strathern in their

interesting comparative study, which covered Papua New Guinea,

Rwanda, Sri Lanka and Northern Ireland,15 demonstrating how, by seeing

the three categories of Richess triangle of violence as collective, social enti-

ties and historicizing their positions, victims can become perpetrators

through a series of cycles of revenge. As Whitehead puts it in this frame,

warfare itself emerges as a special subset of violence that particularly

engages these collective identities.16

12. Broch-Due (ed.), p. 3.13. D. Riches (ed.), The Anthropology of Violence (Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1986). Otherrecent collections using Riches definition include Gran Aijmer and Jon Abbink (eds),

Meanings of Violence; a cross cultural perspective (Berg, Oxford, 2000), and Bettina E.

Schmidt and Ingo W. Schroder (eds), Anthropology of Violence and Conflict (Routledge,London, 2001).14 Whitehead (ed ) p 56


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690 AFRICANAFFAIRS

Two developments of Richess analysis have proved particularly influen-

tial in the current generation of works on violence. One is an emphasis on

the aspect ofperformance in acts of violence, the other is the implicationthat political violence or warfare is just a subset of the wider social category

of violence. The first is explored by many of the contributors to White-

heads volume, which stands out among the edited collections here in its

unusual intellectual coherence, thanks to the format of the School of

American Research Advanced Seminar series, in which participants discuss

and revise their contributions together over an extended period. However,

there remain considerable differences among Whiteheads contributors:

the historical approach adopted by Stephen Ellis on Liberia, for example,

contrasts with the phenomenological, highly personal, style favoured byCarolyn Nordstrom. Here, as in her own most recent book, Shadows of War:

Violence, power, and international profiteering in the twenty-first century,

Nordstrom writes a confessional, first-person, journalistic prose which

some find very readable. Others may see her writing style as sentimental,

and her rhetoric of fieldwork under fire17 as potentially somewhat self-

aggrandizing.

Whiteheads own contribution to the collection seeks to bring the phe-

nomenological and the social/historical approaches together, through the

notion of a poetics of violence. He writes that

[P]articular cultural meanings ofmodalities of violence will produce the specific

instances of killing, maiming, and assault that otherwise appear unintelligible. Ethnic

cleansing in Bosnia that emphasized rape and execution with mallets and hammers,

civil war in Sierra Leone that took the hands and feet of prisoners, anal impalement

that invokes key cultural categories in Rwanda, kneecapping in Northern Ireland and

so on all these specific forms of violence are not produced by the febrile excess of

savage or pathological minds but are cultural performances whose poetics derive from

the history and sociocultural relationships of the locale. However, representations of

such intimate violence are also globalized through the media so that the intimacy of

local violence is paraded on a global stage.

18

This of course raises wider questions about the notion of terror, and the

ways in which its more spectacular performances may serve both to strike

fear into the enemy, and sometimes to do so through mass media coverage.

This is perhaps the only thing in common between the 9/11 terrorists in

the United States and an African group such as Ugandas Lords Resistance

Army, which is similarly classified by the US State Department as a terror-

ist organization.

17 The title of an earlier edited collection: Carolyn Nordstrom and Antonius C G M


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The use of the term poetics, however, leaves me uneasy. It runs the risk

of aestheticizing violence and exoticising certain of its forms. While spec-

tacular dramatic performances of violent acts may be important in somecultural areas (Amazonia and parts of West Africa spring to mind), in other

places violence takes more mundane if no less horrific forms. Aestheticiz-

ing African and other Third World forms of violence has its own long his-

tory, and citizens of wealthy Northern states that prefer to fight their wars

in other continents using advanced technologies should perhaps avoid an

excessive sense of moral superiority vis--vis poorer nations and people

who can only afford to fight at home, with cruder weapons.

One aspect of such a sense of superiority derives from a Weberian notion

of violence that runs deep in Western political theory: the distinctionbetween violence performed on the part of a state (especially against its

own population), seen as at least potentially legitimate (even if this legiti-

macy may be contested in certain circumstances), and violent acts carried

out by non-state actors, such as rebel groups. In many African circum-

stances, however, this distinction is hard to sustain. Leaving aside any

question as to the legitimacy of governments and the artificial and con-

tested nature of state borders in parts of Africa, the distinction between

state and non-state actors collapses when rebel groups are supported by

neighbouring states. In my own work in Uganda in the late 1990s, by theborders with Sudan and what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, it

was obvious that each of the three countries was using rebel groups in the

others as surrogates for national forces. Sudan and (what was then) Zaire

supported various Ugandan rebel groups, and the former bombed north-

ern Ugandan towns, while Ugandan troops took part in military advances

by the Sudan Peoples Liberation Army and the Allied Democratic Front

for the Liberation of CongoZaire.19 This is not particularly unusual in

African wars and should at least cause us to question the applicability of

the Weberian distinction between legitimate use of force by established

states and the illegitimate use of force by non-state actors against the inter-

ests of national governments.

Another problem with much of the recent literature on African wars,

also derived from Euro-American philosophical assumptions and exempli-

fied in the northern Uganda situation, is precisely the use of Richess trian-

gle of violence. The distinction between victim, perpetrator and

19. See Mark Leopold, Trying to hold things together: International NGOs caught up in

an emergency in North Western Uganda, 1996-97, in Ondine Barrow and Michael Jennings(eds), The Charitable Impulse: NGOs and development in east and north-east Africa (James Currey,Oxford and Kumarian Press Bloomfield CT 2001) and Mark Leopold Inside West Nile:


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witness, even when collectivized and historicized la Stewart and Strath-

ern to take into account cycles of revenge as in Rwanda and, arguably,

northern Uganda is thoroughly based in Western legal/political catego-ries. Riches himself (Whitehead, ed., pp. 578) sees it as rooted in Anglo

Saxon cultural traditions (which relate to the same distinction between

legitimate and illegitimate force I have noted above as Weberian), but we

can also see a more recent precursor in the legal forms deployed in the

Nuremberg trials of Nazi war crimes. The three positions in the triangle

thus relate to a European political and legal tradition. They also fail to

explain the position of, let us say, a twelve-year-old girl abducted by

Ugandas Lords Resistance Army, forced to kill her mother and to witness

(and take part in) numerous atrocities, and then displayed by a non-governmental organization (NGO) to the worlds media as simultaneously

a victim, a perpetrator and a witness. While Stewart and Strathern argued

that the addition of a social and historical dimension shows how the same

people may occupy different roles in the triangle at different times, I would

go further and suggest that the same people may be simultaneously perpe-

trator, victim and witness.20

The above example raises another set of issues around violence and war-

fare: the roles of age and gender. The former is the focus of Abbink and

van Kessels edited collection. In his introduction, Abbink writes that

Being young in Africa is widely and consistently perceived as problematic in essence.

Social analysts, policy makers, NGOs, governments and international organisations

all reiterate that African youth is in deep trouble and enmeshed in violence. While

understandable, this view is overburdening and prejudges the issues before under-

standing themBoth theoretically and empirically one needs to avoid positing youth

and generational tension in Africa as an inherently destructive or exceptional factor in

the social order. This reveals a kind of Hobbesian worldview applied to Africa.21

On the other hand, he makes the point that young people are prominently

involved in most of the existing armed conflicts and criminal networks onthe African continent22 and goes further than Whitehead in seeing aspects

of the performance of violence as resulting from a non-rational excess,

which Abbink is happy to allude to as evil:

Another serious question is that of cultures of violence, more or less durable, socially

rooted patterns of repeated violent practice or performance among certain groups that

become integrated in a way of life and that thrive on intimidation and the abuse of

20. I am not suggesting that this complication of roles is a particularly African phenomenon.

See the historian Joanna BourkesAn Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-face killing in twenti-eth-century warfare (Granta Books, London, 1999), for many European and North Americanexamples Within Africa itself Keitetsis book is a vivid first-person example from the


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power. [A] political economic explanation of such violence simply falls short

here. The elements of enjoyment are disturbing and perhaps have to be explained

in another way.

23

Here, he cites a book with the uncompromising title Evil: Inside human

cruelty and violence.24

The problem with this is not the notion of evil as such. A number of

recent writers, particularly philosophers and cultural theorists, have similarly

evoked the theological notion of evil as a way of understanding such situa-

tions of excessive violence, which seem to transcend the usual categories of

rational explanation.25 What is problematic is when such excess is seen as a

peculiarly or particularly African phenomenon, evoking the old and perni-

cious tradition of displaying the continent as a unique Heart of Darkness(this is explicitly notAbbinks position, although his co-edited collection is

devoted to Africa). If the roots of African violence lie in such an ineluctable

and inexplicable cause as evil, then what is the point of trying to under-

stand, never mind attempting to ameliorate, it? Both for academics and for

the [s]ocial analysts, policy makers, NGOs, governments and international

organisations previously mentioned by Abbink, this would be a counsel of

despair. Fortunately, Abbink and van Kessels contributors do not take such

a position; Jok Madut Joks interesting chapter on War, changing ethics and

the position of youth in South Sudan, for example, concludes that violenceperpetrated by or exercised against youth is not just the immediate outcome

of a prolonged war but is also the sharp end of a long historical process.26

One serious problem with emphasizing the role of children and youths in

violence and war is once again one of definition. Abbink points this out in

his introduction but does not resolve the issues. The fact is that in Africa

local definitions of childhood and youth tend to differ from those used in

international law and by bodies such as the United Nations Childrens Fund

(UNICEF). People who would be considered minors in Europe and North

America are frequently expected to assume a range of adult roles, includ-ing working and being sexually active, as well as fighting in wars, while oth-

ers may not count as full adults until their late thirties. One may deplore

this, but it remains true and makes it problematic to use the concepts of

youth or childhood in describing and analyzing African societies. Another

specific ethnographic factor is the existence of formalized age sets in some

23. Ibid., pp. 18-9.24. R. F. Baumeister, Evil: Inside human cruelty and violence (W. H. Freeman, New York, 1996).

25. See e.g. Gary Banham and Charlie Blake (eds), Evil Spirits, Nihilism and the Fate ofModernity (Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2000); John Kekes,Facing Evil (Princ-eton University Press Princeton NJ 1990); Joan Copjec (ed ) Radical Evil (Verso London


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African pastoralist societies.27 Finally, it is important to note, as many of

Abbink and van Kessels contributors do, the more positive image of

associations between the youth and violence in Africas liberation strug-gles, as well as in post-colonial uprisings against various dictatorships.28

One factor that is perhaps surprising in most of the chapters and books I

have discussed here is the comparative lack of gender analysis. This is not

to advocate a simplistic view of males as inherently violent: one look at

Keitetsis account of her life as a child soldier with Ugandas National

Resistance Army would swiftly disabuse anyone of the notion that women

(or girls) are somehow inherently non-violent. The extraordinary tale it

tells (however unreliably in detail) of a child choosing to leave her abusive

family and join a then rebel group (now Ugandas much-admiredgovernment) offers a valuable correction against many of the pieties in the

academic literature about children, women, liberation fighters and con-

flict in general. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that violence, in its varied

forms, is almost always strongly gendered. Moreover, gender violence, rape

and so on demonstrate two points made by many of the contributors to

these volumes: the close links between organized warfare and less public

forms of violence, and the ways in which violence is embedded in wider

social processes. There are still too few works that have followed up the

pioneering work of Suzette Heald on the relationship between models ofmasculinity in Africa and violence.29

Another important issue, which could be further developed than in much

of the current wave of volumes on violence, is the role of religion, both the

so-called world religions and more local practices and beliefs, in producing

and shaping the forms of violence. An exception here is Joks chapter on

South Sudan in Abbink and van Kessels book. He suggests that one cause

of inter-generational breakdown of communication in the region is

[T]he mass conversion to Christianity on the part of thousands upon thousands of

younger South Sudanese boys and girls[which] has driven an ideological wedgebetween them and many of their seniorshas undercut the former religious authority

of community elders and has splintered, socially and spiritually, numerous families

and communities.30

Another interesting account of the role of religion in violence is that of

Stephen Ellis, who writes in Whiteheads collection that Liberians inter-

pretation of the deeper meanings of their countrys war [are] generally

27. Abbinks own ethnographic work has been amongst such a group, the Suriof southernEthiopia. Another article in his co-edited collection, by Simon Simonse, is also about a pasto-

ralist group, the Karamojong of north east Uganda, for whom age sets are important.28. E.g., in addition to those mentioned elsewhere in this article, Murray Last, pp. 3754,G Thomas Burgess pp 5578 Karel Arnaut pp 110142 and Sara Rich Dorman pp 189204


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expressed in religious idioms. He concludes (in terms that foreshadow

some of my own points in the present article),

It seems increasingly clear that social scientists confronted with interpretations of viol-

ence that place it within a religious cosmology should not have recourse only to the

classics of a social science literature that, however brilliant, were the product of

authors steeped in European history; like all of us, Weber and Durkheim were chil-

dren of their time. Increasingly apparent is the need for analysts to study the particu-

lar content of religious thought, rather than assuming from the outset of their inquiry

that spiritual beings represent only the translation of other, secular forces, such as

economic and political structures, that are deemed to be more real.31

The different roles played by religious beliefs and organizations in different

conflicts and forms of violence in Africa are complex and worthy of moresustained attention in future work.

In this article, I have discussed a wide range of recent work on violence

in Africa, but it has not been possible, within the confines of space and

coherence, to do justice to all the many interesting writers that have con-

tributed to these volumes. Instead I have focussed on some of the defini-

tional questions that continue to bedevil the field and have suggested that

many of these issues arise from the ethnocentric nature of some basic

assumptions of social science. Others are due to the bewildering variety of

phenomena under discussion. Despite the widespread and intellectuallylively nature of current academic interest in violence, I am left with a nig-

gling suspicion that all these problems of definition may in the end indicate

that there are limits to the analytical usefulness of such a broad and baggy

conceptual category.


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Violence in Contemporary Africa