This paper advances an ethnic community perspective of militant ideology in Nigeria's Niger Delta region. Armed groups claimed to represent the interest of marginalized communities in the struggle for resource and environmental rights. Current knowledge on this issue spotlights communities' perspectives before militant groups emerged and the motivations and conduct of armed groups during the insurgency. However, there has been little or no attention on why and how ordinary civilians in communities relate to the ideological claims of armed groups during and after the organized armed militancy. This paper seeks to fill this gap by analyzing empirical data from two ethnic communities in the region. The paper identifies and explains the aspects of the ideological claims of armed militant groups that resonates among ordinary civilians in ethnic communities. The paper also explains the role of ideological narratives in fostering popular support and/or opposition of armed militant groups in the region. Findings from this research enhance the current understanding of how ordinary civilians in communities relates with armed groups that claim to have a people oriented ideology.

Les groupes rebelles («insurgents») ont été un acteur incontournable dans l'histoire récente de nombreux pays africains. Des auteurs tels que Monica Duffy Toft et Jeremy Weinstein ont soutenu que la victoire des rebelles peut avoir des conséquences positives sur la gouvernance dans l'après-guerre, conduisant à une transformation profonde des institutions. Jusqu'à présent néanmoins les analyses se sont concentres sur peu de cas «emblématiques» comme le Rwanda et l'Uganda, ou des groups cohésifs et idéologiquement motives ont bâti des régimes autoritaires cohérents et efficaces. Dans ce papier, j'évalue les conséquences de la victoire militaire des opposants en Côte d'Ivoire, ou le gagnant n'a pas été un group cohésif mais une coalition composée de différents acteurs militaires et politiques. Même si les institutions créées par les rebelles des Forces Nouvelles (FN) dans la partie Nord du pays ont été officiellement démantelés, les réseaux des leaders des FN continuent à exister a côté des forces de sécurité et des institutions étatiques. J'analyse les conséquences que la transition de la guerre à la paix a eu sur les rapports de force dans la coalition gagnante au plan nationale et je présent aussi un projet de recherche en cours dont l'objectif est d'investiguer la transformation de la gouvernance au plan locale dans les zones anciennement contrôlées par les FN.

Ideology has been an important guiding force among African insurgent groups, yet it is often hard to disentangle what exactly different groups want, the origins of their ideological principles and resultant goals, and how exactly groups differ from one another across ideological components. The inability of academics and policy analysts to disentangle the often unclear or overlapping elements of African insurgent ideologies has frequently hampered engagement with and counteraction of groups by national governments and international actors. This paper introduces a new analytic device, the African Insurgent Ideology Matrix (AIIM), to help academics and policymakers distinguish the main ideological differences and similarities that characterize African insurgent groups, in order to improve understanding and to more effectively craft strategies to prevent and reduce violence in both domestic and transnational contexts. The AIIM draws distinctions between groups based on their expressed ideological goals regarding desired religious, political, social, and/or economic changes, and how these goals are manifested in their choice of targets for violence. To introduce the AIIM and demonstrate its analytic utility, we code the ideologies of 54 insurgent groups active on the African continent during the decade of 2004-2013, and offer empirical case examples.

This paper examines the scope and significance of armed group ideology in light of the tendency to dismiss African rebel groups as lacking ideology. Existing studies of African wars often rely on historically informed typologies that categorize insurgents' aims and beliefs according to their position vis-à-vis liberation struggles or external sponsorship. Such historical contingencies weaken the analytical salience and operationalizability of ideology as a category and concept. This paper critically examines the political historiography of African armed group ideologies to identify how and why they began to be dismissed in the past quarter-century. I excavate the ideology of the Revolutionary United Front of Sierra Leone - a paradigmatic apolitical, resource-driven rebel group - to examine the contours and bounds of rebel ideology in practice. Using original documents and ex-combatant interviews, I demonstrate that the group's key text and widely accepted narratives about 'Green Book' inspiration are wholly inconsistent with the internal ideology training manuals used to educate members. Moreover, violence and coercion were integral to the group's 'ideology training' that is often presumed to be separate and apart from physical-military practice. The analysis raises important epistemic questions about how syncretic ideologies have been measured and silenced, and empirical questions about the transmission of political ideas between rebel leaders and fighters.

In 2012, twenty years of peace in Mozambique came to an end. Confrontations between government forces and soldiers loyal to Renamo opposition leader Afonso Dhlakama escalated into a low-intensity but deadly conflict, to which repeated efforts at mediation failed to find a solution. This paper considers Renamo's ideological appeals in mobilising support for this recent conflict. It takes into account scholarly debates on the pre-1992 war, which have centred on the extent to which Renamo was pursuing an autonomous political agenda. Critics argued that Renamo's adoption of a liberal, anti-Marxist rhetoric was opportunistic. Sympathisers emphasised that Renamo won local support through its opposition to Frelimo's attempts to centralise agricultural production or, more generally, through Renamo's defence of traditional authority against the centralising ambitions of the Frelimo state. By analysing interviews with Renamo supporters and the speeches of Renamo politicians I show how Renamo has gained popular support for renewed military offensive by creating a set of meanings about the post-2012 conflict and its continuities with the pre-1992 war that link Renamo's historic role to recent grievance concerning Frelimo's governance. Terms such as 'socialism' and 'freedom' are borrowed from the rhetoric of Cold War era politics and applied to contemporary practices. In an era when Frelimo has embraced capitalism and adopted, at least in a formal sense, multiparty democracy, Renamo is thus able to present itself as the progenitor and current defender of norms that Frelimo has betrayed.