Africa

Securitisation of research: fieldwork under new restrictions in Darfur and Mali

Knowledge on conflict-affected areas is becoming increasingly important for scholarship and policy. This article identifies a recent change in knowledge production regarding 'zones of danger', attributing it not only to the external environment, but also to an on-going process of securitisation of research resulting from institutional and disciplinary practices. Research is increasingly framed by security concerns and is becoming a security concern in itself, although the implications are not readily acknowledged. To illustrate these developments, we draw on fieldwork in Mali and Darfur.

Den globale flyktningkrisen - de synlige og de usynlige

(Available in Norwegian only): Den europeiske delen av den globale flyktningkirsen har skapt et nyy geografisk hierarki av synlige og unsynlige flyktninger. De synlige er de som kommer til Europa eller har en mulighet til det. De usynlige er de som ikke har denne muligheten. Dette hierarkiet har store implikasjoner både med tanke på hvilke dimensjoner av den globale flyktningkirsen som synes og hvilke som forblir unsynlige, men også for hvilke typer av politikk som benyttes og hvilke prioriteringer som gjøres

Displacement, belonging, and land rights in Grand Gedeh, Liberia: almost at home abroad?

Conflicts over local land rights between groups considered as “sons of the soil” and newcomers such as refugees can trigger autochthony-inspired violence. However, such conflicts are not always manifested, even when the conditions are in place. The question we explore in this article is whether such conflicts are less likely to emerge if the “other” is from a group with a longstanding bond of interethnic allegiance with the host community. Based on ethnographic data from host–refugee communities in Grand Gedeh, Liberia, we revisit previous attempts to explain economic and social relations between majority and minority groups. Our main finding is that in this part of Africa no prior special status will fundamentally alter the established ways of incorporating strangers into the community.

Wars and Warlords

The debate about war in African studies has gone through a number of important changes. Until the end of the Cold War, African wars were often fueled by super-power competition. After the end of the Cold War most were either solved peacefully or simply collapsed as external support dried up. Some, however, continued, such as the Lord’s Resistance Army war, and new ones emerged. One was the intertwining of civil wars in West Africa’s Mano River Basin. Another was created by the collapse of the Mobutist state in Zaire that drew in a number of neighboring countries. Lately the Sahel is also experiencing a similar trend. During the Cold War, conflict in Africa was often referred to as “war by proxy,” in reference to external factors as important causes of conflict. After the end of the Cold War, much more emphasis has been placed on internal factors, first ethnicity and later the so-called greed and grievance debate. The approach to the warlord concept in African studies is closely tied to these debates. In general terms, a warlord is an individual who has control over an area because this person commands armed forces that are loyal to the warlord. A precise definition of this phenomenon is therefore available. The challenge, however, is that this term almost automatically brings forth powerful images of rape, loot, and plunder committed by heavily armed, thuggish-looking men. Contrary to the relatively sober academic debate about wars and warlords elsewhere in the world, the debate about warlords in Africa has tended to be extremely politicized and used to name and shame specific persons. Until the early 1990s, the warlord concept was used sparsely in African studies, but then it became more prevalent, promoted by debates about the civil wars in the Mano River Basin, where influential scholars such as Paul Collier argued that African civil wars were driven by greed and not grievances. Soon, the warlord label was attached to almost all conflicts on the continent. However, this also led to the emergence of a counterdebate that questioned the validity of greedy warlords as explanatory factors and argued for a multidimensional approach that also took into consideration social, political, and historical factors. The outcome was a much more nuanced but also diverse debate, where many of the most prominent scholars question the usefulness of the warlord concept.

The BRICS: The Last Line of Defence for Globalisation?

In the West, the rise of nationalist populism reached a tipping point in 2016 when it generated both the United Kingdom vote for Brexit and the election of Donald Trump as President in the United States of America. In contrast, the BRICS have over this same period invested in strengthening their commitment to the United Nations, global governance and economic globalisation. Although their primary focus has been on inter-BRICS financial, trade and economic cooperation, they opted to focus their 2017 annual Summit on developing strategies to defend global governance, economic globalisation, free trade and collective climate action. How did we get to the point where it seems to be up to the BRICS to play an important role in rescuing globalisation?

Negotiating justice: legal pluralism and gender-based violence in Liberia

The plural legal system in post-conflict Liberia expresses tensions between modern and customary institutions. This article seeks to understand how Liberians navigate choices in the plural legal system to address gender-based violence cases. By asking how and why people make the choices they do, we highlight how Liberians solve tensions between institutions, by creating flexible categories that allow them to pursue a course of action that does not compromise their ability to access social networks and resources.

Towards UN counter-terrorism operations?

The United Nations (UN) peacekeeping operation in Mali (MINUSMA) has become among the deadliest in UN history, suffering from attacks by violent extremists and terrorists. There are strong calls to give UN peacekeeping operations more robust mandates and equip them with the necessary capabilities, guidelines and training to be able to take on limited stabilisation and counter-terrorism tasks. This article conceptually develops UN counter-terrorism operations as a heuristic device, and compares this with the mandate and practices of MINUSMA. It examines the related implications of this development, and concludes that while there may be good practical as well as short-term political reasons for moving in this direction, the shift towards UN counter-terrorism operations will undermine the UN’s international legitimacy, its role as an impartial conflict arbiter, and its tools in the peace and security toolbox more broadly, such as UN peacekeeping operations and special political missions.

Annerledesdemokratiet