The Heart of the African Conflict Zone: Democratization, Ethnicity, Civil Conflict, and the Great Lakes Crisis

In the 1990s, simultaneous with a wave of democratization that proved only partially successful, Africa was swept by protracted civil conflicts, which had a number of novel attributes. The Great Lakes region—Congo-Kinshasa, Rwanda, and Burundi—was the epicenter. In their dynamics and demographics, the violent combats became interpenetrated, embroiling the three countries in intractable struggles. Their extraordinary complexity, and multiplicity of state and other actors, interrogated a number of distinct literatures. State decay and collapse, a broader phenomenon in Africa, was especially marked in Congo-Kinshasa. In all three countries, the irresistible pressures for democratization—which were part of a broader African pattern—triggered violent struggles over definitions of identity, citizenship, and indigeneity. The legal, moral, and analytical issue of genocide returned to the research agenda with a vengeance with the Rwandan catastrophe in 1994, and mass ethnic killings in Burundi and Congo-Kinshasa. The new dynamics of African civil wars and warlord politics demanded inquiry. Finally, the necessity of international intervention to contain and mediate the violence brought new attention to peacekeeping issues.