ABSTRACT
Africa in general still registers onto the world’s mental map as a tinderbox of violent conflicts perhaps evidenced by the 70 wars fought on the continent since the 1980s (Englebert and Dunn 2013: 267). The Great Lakes Region (GLR) in particular, Daley notes, has registered approximately 11 wars in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) since 1960, five in Burundi, two in Rwanda and about six in Uganda (Lemarchand 1999: Daley 2006a, 2006b: 303; Gleditsch 2009: 597). Evidentially, diverse scholarship has identified the region with the notorious Uganda’s Lord Resistance Army (LRA), their crude brutality and sexual enslavement of captives, with the DRC’s plethora of militias such as the mai mai, M23 fighters, with Rwanda’s Federal Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) Hutu militias and genocidaires, with Burundi’s National Liberation Forces (FNL) and general regional fragility amidst a phenomenal gift of natural resources (Collier and Hoeffler 1998, 2000; Henderson and Singer 2000; Lemarchand 2009; Strauss 2012a, 2012b; Omeje and Hepner 2013; Englebert and Dunn 2013). While this could be critiqued as oversimplification of Africa and the GLR situation in particular, there is no denying that there is still some grain of truth in the observation. Most recently however, there is an unmistakable positive change in the durability of political stability and security, an emerging kind of détente in the region both within and between states (Strauss 2012a: 184). What primarily explains this rapprochement? This chapter offers a general examination of conflicts dynamics in the GLR, briefly interrogating the nature of conflicts, their causes and consequently accounts for the emergent thaw.
