ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to highlight several inter-related factors in the conflict of the Great Lakes Region (GLR), with a view to provoke robust discussions on these issues, and maybe establish nodal points for further research. It looks at what is meant by the concepts, 'ethnicity', 'power', 'governance' and 'conflict'; and then explores the way they are applied in the GLR. The chapter focuses on regime patterns, explaining the similarities among them; and surveys the influence of extra-African powers in the region. Ethnicity and regime patterns feed into each other to give credence to the concept of ethnicity, and hence the much publicized but also feared recreation of the Great Hima Empire in the GLR. The chapter also focuses on the topical issue of the Great Hima Empire. Its purported re-creation may symbolize form of a security community, albeit lopsided.
