Panel 49: Making War, Building States. Critical perspectives on conflict and statehood in Africa

Why do rebels fight? Do they have a cause to defend? In the last 20 years, the origins and causes of civil wars in Africa have been a constant object of debate, as the very political nature of such conflicts has been questioned. The ‘new wars’ (Kaldor) of the 1990s were no longer fought ‘with’ or ‘alongside the people’ for the defence of clearly articulated political goals sustained by clear ideologies, but ‘against the people’ by greedy rebels exclusively interested in getting their share of the economic and political cake.

Against such approaches, this panel will focus on the political legitimacy of civil wars. It seeks to foster understanding for how ‘rebels’ articulate their violent actions around political and social claims, and how they struggle to build and sustain their legitimacy. The panel thus reflects on the mechanisms through which civil wars ‘produce’ statehood by looking at how conflicts open up new arenas of negotiation where social actors compete for power and control of state institutions in the aftermath of conflict. This includes such crucial dimensions of statehood as citizenship, nationhood, representation of social or ethnic groups in the state apparatus, or the distribution of resources, which are indeed often at the centre of rebel grievances.

We therefore invite papers that concentrate on the continuities rather than on the ruptures between conflict and post-conflict as well as on the trajectories of governance through violent conflict.