ABSTRACT
Communal conflicts of one sort or another are implicated in cases of state collapse and humanitarian disaster in Liberia, Rwanda and Somalia. This chapter discusses each of these cases in turn, but some general discussion will provide a contextual background. Popular commentary highlights Liberia as epitomizing Africa’s potential for anarchy. Several scholarly analyses of the Liberian conflict are broadly compatible in the accounts they give of these phenomena, but each has a distinctive emphasis in explaining Liberia’s contribution to the aetiology of conflict in post-Cold War Africa. The politics of ethno-nationalism and tribalism in contemporary Africa have to be seen, logically enough, in contemporary terms. The extremity of the violence in Rwanda has been arresting, even by the destructive standards of ethno-nationalist conflict in the post-Cold War world. Perhaps the principal contribution of Somalia to any review of sub-national conflict in the post-Cold War world, is to offer evidence of Africa’s contrariness.
