Tag Archives: conflict

Four Cases of Conflict Over Resources: #2 Private Motivation in Sierra Leone

Posted on August 16, 2018 | 2 comments

This post is the second of four African cases that demonstrates why conflict happens. See the introduction here.

What does “private motivation” in conflict mean? It means that an individual sees war or fighting as a way to get more wealth for him or herself. It is one of the more clear-cut explanations and the easiest to demonstrate.  It is particularly applicable to sub-Saharan Africa where poverty rates are high, and thus where more needy and desperate people are willing to use conflict as a means of being less poor.

Sierra Leone and the “Private Motivation” Hypothesis (Stewart, 2002): War confers benefits on individuals as well as costs which can motivate people to fight. Young, uneducated men, in particular, may gain employment as soldiers. War also generates opportunities to loot, profiteer from shortages and from aid, trade arms, and carry out illicit production and trade in drugs, diamonds, timber, and other commodities. Where alternative opportunities are few, because of low incomes and poor employment, and the possibilities of enrichment by war are considerable, the incidence and duration of wars are likely to be greater. This “greed hypothesis” has its base in rational choice economics.

The view that private motivation plays an important role in prolonging, if not causing, conflict in some countries is well supported by work in the Sudan, Sierra Leone, and Liberia. Collier and Hoeffler (2004) tested the greed hypothesis and found a significant association with conflict, although this has been challenged. They also found that greater male education to higher secondary level reduced the risk of war. They concluded that “greed” outperforms grievance in explaining conflict. I have written about this in terms of oil’s impact on the history of conflict in the Niger Delta.

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My Relatively Quick Summary of the Sierra Leonean Civil War of 1991-2002: The West African country of Sierra Leone, a former British colony, experienced decades of poverty, economic exploitation, and poor governance by the single political party in power, the All People’s Congress (APC), between independence in 1961 and the start of the civil war in 1991. The state was not weak but nearly non-functional, as the judiciary depended on bribery, parliamentarians bankrupted the national treasury, and the military served primarily as a tool of oppression of political opponents. Despite ample natural resources such as diamonds, gold, and other precious metals, Sierra Leone was one of the poorest countries in the world. Finally, the entire educational system collapsed in the 1980s when the government could no longer pay public school teachers, thus creating a generation of uneducated, unemployed and disgruntled youths who would later be drawn into rebel factions.

In 1991, former army corporal Foday Sankoh and his Revolutionary United Front (RUF) implemented a rebel campaign against President Momoh by capturing towns on the Liberian border. The RUF enjoyed the support and guidance of Charles Taylor and the NPFL in neighboring Liberia, the latter actors seeking access to Sierra Leone’s diamond mines. Momoh responded by deploying troops to the border region to undermine the RUF and repel the incursion the NPFL. The two insurgent groups attacked Sierra Leone’s army in turn, and the government’s inability to quell the insurgency soon became clear.

The number of insurgents and the number of weapons they held grew faster than the government could react. The Kono and Kenema districts of Sierra Leone were rich with alluvial diamonds that could be gathered by individuals with a shovel and easily transported by hand (as opposed to other resources that cannot be looted by individuals, such as oil). This accessibility of diamonds gave individuals immense reason join the RUF forces as a means of getting diamonds and profit, and also to violently force labor by civilians who would turn over the diamonds they found. A looting phenomenon occurred in which disaffected Sierra Leoneans without access to arable land for farming joined the rebel cause as a means of also extracting cash, household items, food, livestock, cars, and even international aid shipments to enrich themselves.

In April 1992, Captain Valentine Strasser deposed Momoh in a coup, citing the poor conditions endured by the troops engaged in fighting the rebels as one of the reasons. Strasser was made head of state with a National Provisional Ruling Council (NPRC) as the ruling party. The civil war escalated under Strasser, with the RUF increasing the amount of territory under its control, including the lucrative mines that were the source of the “blood diamonds” used to fund wartime activities. The ease with which diamonds can be sold on the world’s black market illegally also made it vitally important that rebels use extreme violence to secure their control over these areas and the weapons the natural resources could fund. Soon, RUF, NPFL, rogue insurgents, and some government troops began committing heinous atrocities against the civilian population, including mutilation of limbs and faces, sexual violence, and forced labor on in mining and agricultural strongholds. Forced conscription was common and made many civilians unwilling participants in the conflict, including as many as 10,000 child soldiers.

 

Intense violence continued as Strasser tried unsuccessfully to beat back the RUF until he was ousted in a military coup in January 1996. The NPRC feared that he would back out of his promise to transfer power to a civilian government. General Julius Maada Bio briefly assumed control of the national government with the pledge that elections would soon be held. However, the RUF asked that elections be postponed until a ceasefire or peace accord was agreed upon. The RUF intensified its violent campaign when the NPRC refused. Elections were still held in February 1996 and Ahmad Tejan Kabbah was elected president. He signed a peace accord, the Abidjan Agreement, with Sankoh’s RUF in November which failed to bring an end to the fighting.

In May 1997, Major Johnny Paul Koroma ousted President Kabbah with the help of the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC), which included former RUF members. With Kahhab in exile in Guinea, Koroma quickly suspends the constitution, bans demonstrations, and abolishes political parties. The AFRC fought increasing resistance on all fronts: domestically, its troops were engaged in battle with militia forces loyal to Kabbah’s government, internationally, the British Commonwealth suspended Sierra Leone from membership for bad behavior, and the United Nations Security Council imposed economic sanctions on Sierra Leone.

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The Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group (ECOMOG) troops and international supporters helped overthrow the AFRC and restored Kabbah in 1998. ECOMOG and government troops continued to battle rebel forces until July 1999 when the Lomé Agreement proposed a power-sharing plan that included Sankoh and other rebels in the government, and required the RUF and the AFRC forces to surrender. Angry at their exclusion from the Lomé Agreement, AFRC forces began taking hostages; meanwhile, RUF rebels continued their attacks against civilians and UN workers and refused to turn in their weapons as agreed. Sankoh was finally captured in the capital of Freetown and the RUF driven out by government forces in 2000, with the help of British troops and pro-government militias. General Issa Sesay took over commanding the RUF and other heavily armed militias also held power in the country. Throughout 2001, the Lomé Agreement was slowly implemented by the United Nations and some RUF rebels and the pro-government militia members were disarmed. The RUF also released some territory to the UN that had been under its control.

The End of the War: The Sierra Leonean Civil War ended in January 2002, after an estimated 50,000 people had died, with some 2,000,000 people displaced by the conflict. These numbers are staggering in a country with a population of only 6 million people. Foday Sankoh died in prison while awaiting a war crimes indictment in 2003 and Charles Taylor was charged for his role in instigating murder and rape and arming RUF fighters when charged with war crimes in the The Hague in 2007. Unfortunately, Sierra Leone has not made the strides that Rwanda has.

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Four Cases of Conflict Over Resources: #1 Rwanda

Posted on August 15, 2018 | 3 comments

In reviewing some cases of conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa, I was reminded that I could not name a single one in which some form of natural resource, e.g. land, precious metals or other tradable commodities, did not undergird the fighting. I was fascinated anew in rereading about the histories of four conflicts in particular and will be making various posts that describe these in a nutshell. This is the first, and it will cover the issue of land scarcity in the Rwandan Genocide.  The other four cases to follow—Liberia, Sierra Leone, and the Niger Delta—are about overabundance rather than scarcity. For a great narrative about land scarcity’s role in the 1994 genocide, you can also read Chapter 10, “Malthus in Africa,” of Jared Diamond’s “Collapse.” This title refers to the Malthusian dilemma in which human population tends to exceed the capacity for food production to feed that population.

The cases demonstrate four possible hypotheses about what might cause, sustain, and give form to civil conflicts in Africa. No conflict is ever driven by a single factor and conflict is always the interaction of many factors. Note that these conflicts arose in the era after the Cold War of comparably informal warfare and thus were quite different from most previous conflicts in the 20th century. As opposed to traditional wars, these are examples of “new” or “hybrid” conflicts because they A) involve many non-state actors, B) were based on identity more than ideology, C) used fear to garner political control, and D) were financed through predation rather than taxes. Modern conflicts in developing countries, particularly in Africa, can often be partially explained along these lines.

Rwanda and the “Green War” Explanation: This points to environmental degradation and scarcity as a source of poverty and cause of conflict. For example, rising population pressure and falling agricultural productivity may lead to land disputes. Lack of water may provoke conflict, e.g. Sudan. Environmental stress like that in 1990s Rwanda tends to make people prone to violence as they seek alternatives to desperate situations. In the Rwandan context, lack of access to farming land—necessary to food production and even securing marriage for young men—helped impel the violence (in combination with other historical and geographic factors).

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My Relatively Quick Summary of the Rwandan Genocide:  The mountainous country of Rwanda in Central Africa was controlled first by Germany and then after WWI by Belgium until its independence in 1962. Belgian rulers systematically favored the minority Tutsis over the majority Hutu groups, which sowed the seeds of ethnic tensions that were a significant factor in later conflicts for Rwanda. A 1959 Hutu revolution forced 300,000 Tutsis to flee and Hutus officially took over when they ousted the last Tutsi monarch in 1961. Ethnically motivated violence ensued in the following decades, including after the installment of a moderate Hutu, Major General Juvenal Habyarimana, as head of state. He ruled through his party, the National Revolutionary Movement for Development (NRMD), for the next two decades as he ossified his power in elections in which he was the sole candidate. During this time, hundreds of thousands of Tutsis refugees were living in Uganda and attempting to re-enter the country through the forces of their Rwandese Patriotic Front (RPF). From 1990-1993, PRF fighters attempted a takeover of the capital of Kigali until Habyarima agreed to the creation of a transition government that would include the Tutsis, an agreement inflaming Hutu extremists.  In this context, the Rwandan Genocide was a single three-month phase of the larger Rwanda Civil War (1990-1994).

Environmental conditions were ripe for conflict by the spring of 1994. Rwanda was a landlocked and impoverished country that relied, as it does today, on agriculture. Fluctuating world prices for coffee on the world market in the 1980s began a sustained economic crisis that peaked in 1990 with the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) structural adjustment program for the national economy. The average Rwandan farmer was earning less for their crops in one of the most population dense countries in Africa. There was not enough farmland or resources to sustain working-age Rwandans, including large swathes of unemployed and unpropertied men, and land disputes arose along ethnic lines. Conditions of environmental stress and poverty were extreme.

The single incident that inflamed the genocide occurred in April of 1994, when the plane carrying Habyarimana and the Burundian president was shot down over the capital city of Kigali, killing all occupants. Some blame the RPF and others the Hutu extremists for the assassination. Quickly thereafter on the same day, the Presidential Guard, the Rwandan armed forces (RAF), and Hutu militias–the Interahamwe and Impuzamugambi—began indiscriminately slaughtering Tutsis and moderate Hutus in Kigali. The Rwandan media, specifically government-sponsored radio programs, played a pivotal role in spreading the rallying crying for violence across the rest of the country. Radio broadcasters called for the killing of Tutsi “cockroaches” and encouraged all Hutus to take up arms. This was particularly dangerous in a population-dense environment in which neighbors lived so closely together. Pressure among Hutus to engage in killings quickly spread in clusters within tight-knit communities.

An estimated 850,000 Tutsis were individually killed by hand in a 90-day period, which exceeds the per-day killing rate of any other genocide in world history. Around ¾ of the Tutsi population was killed, along with 1/3 of the Batwa Pygmy population, while ¼ of Hutus engaged in violence. Family members were forced to kill their own family members and join the violence. Génocidaires systematically targeted Tutsi and moderate Hutu women for sexual violence as a weapon of war with the goal of sexual mutilation and spreading AIDs. The sexual violence was so extensive that it became the first event in which rape as a weapon of war would later be prosecuted as an official war crime by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, Netherlands.

The End of the Genocide: The genocide came to an end in July 1994 when the Tutsi-led RPF finally took military control of Kigali and the rest of the country and installed a coalition government. Over 2 million Tutsis were refugees across the border in what is now DRC (then called Zaire) and many returned. Only after the killing ended did the international community respond, and the Rwandan Genocide is often cited as the worst example of global apathy in the face of a clear humanitarian crisis. There were some UN and European peacekeepers on the ground but their mandate did not permit them to use force against the Hutu extremists and there is evidence that some humanitarian zones they created were used a gateway for génocidaires to escape the country. Because of the logistical challenges of prosecuting thousands of violence participants, the RPF established community justice courts called Gacaca courts, a form of transitional justice meant to aid communal healing, closure, and forgiveness on a grassroots level after a collective trauma.

Today, Rwanda is perhaps the greatest example of a country that chose to rebuild positively after mass violence and is an example of constructive change. It has the highest number of female parliamentarians in the world, outlawed reference to tribe or ethnicity (even in casual conversation) to avoid discrimination, hosts a monthly community service day nationwide, was the first country in the world to ban plastic bags as a green initiative, and hosts the most expensive building on the continent. It is a land of surprises today.

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Posted in Environmental Damage, Occupy Nigeria, Violence

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Dissertation on Niger Delta women and the oil movement published

Posted on July 20, 2016 | Leave a comment

My dissertation is available online. If you are unable to access it because you are outside the academic network, please feel free to contact me for a copy. I am an avid supporter of open, author-permitted access to publications.

ABSTRACT:

Since the discovery of oil in the Niger Delta in 1958, there has been an ongoing low-level conflict among foreign oil companies, the federal government, and rural community members in southern Nigeria. Armed insurgents and small cadres of male protesters have resisted oil activities, demanding environmental cleanup, employment, and local compensation for extractive operations. In 2002, however, large groups of women began engaging in peaceful protests against oil companies and the state, making the same demands as men. Current work describes these women as coming together autonomously to assert their rights in the face of corporation exploitation.  This project challenges such accounts and investigates how common perceptions of law and politics inform women’s role in the oil reform movement.

Employing constructivist grounded theory, this dissertation argues that women’s protests were largely a product of local elite male politicking among oil companies and federal and state governments. The first finding is that local chiefs, acting as brokers engaging in “positional arbitrage,” urge women to protest because it reinforces their own traditional rule.  In this sense, women have not implemented new tactics in the movement but instead are the new tactics. Secondly, Niger Delta women see law as innately good but identify individuals as the corrupting force that thwarts law’s potential for positive change. Women also perceive a binary between local and state law, thus allowing chiefs to act as gatekeepers between women and the state. As a qualitative case study, the project uses in-depth interviews, direct observations, and archival documentation to analyze a series of all-female demonstrations that occurred around oil extraction sites in Rivers State from 2002-2012. Ultimately, these findings welcome a more critical look at social movements by identifying ways in which apparent episodes of resistance may actually be reconfigurations of existing power arrangements.

Methodology:

 

 

grounded theory

For a link to my final dissertation, please see:

http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/doc/1666393541.html?FMT=ABS

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Posted in Democracy, Environmental Damage, Gender, Law, Occupy Nigeria, Oil Theory, Violence

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Exploring the Creation of Nigerian Law

Posted on July 23, 2015 | Leave a comment

One of the central debates in the study of African politics surrounds the extent to which Africans have created their own legal systems. Is Nigerian law really even Nigerian?  Has it ever been? This is an important question because one of my lines of analysis for my dissertation will be about how the law shapes the forms of both formal and non-formal resistance in the Niger Delta.  If the law is merely an oppressive colonial construct, it would seem a poor avenue for resolving domestic and local level oil disputes. However, if it is the product of indigenous forces then it has a more legitimate claim to be a conflict resolution mechanism.

The first line of thought is that Nigerian law is not truly owned by the very people it purports to regulate and protect, and it is in fact, a Western project of domination. Comaroff and Comaroff describe Africans as “fetishizing” the domestic law they inherited from colonial powers as well as contemporary international law (Comaroff & Comaroff 2006).  By embracing both of these Western legal systems, Africans are actually reinforcing the disorder that law is intended to stop. Lawlessness in the postcolony is a product of artificially constructed legal regimes that are remnants of colonial rule.  These regimes fail to account for indigenous forms of capital accumulation and conflict resolution mechanisms, creating socioeconomic inequality that begets violence and disorder (29). In terms of modern globalization, judicialization of politics works in favor of corporate capitalism, which has used law to create a deregulated environment conducive to business. Human rights abuses surrounding oil indicate how Africa is entangled in a parallel, pariah economy of international scale that is undergirded by the use of Western forms of law (7).

Mamdani argues that democracy did not follow decolonization because in making their own governments, Africans recreated and reinforced despotic and ethnicized patterns in the bifurcated state. He calls this mode of rule “decentralized despotism.” Essentially, British “indirect rule” allowed for tribal chiefs to become their own little despots (as opposed to the French mode of direct rule which allowed French administrators to be centralized despots). This decentralized authoritarianism undergirds contemporary Nigeria’s struggles with lack of accountability and ethnic tensions (Mamdani 1996).

It has been argued that Nigerian law will never have the ability to function well because of its roots as a European means of exploitation of labor and resources, and because it entrenched previous inactive tribal conflicts that continue today. Its original purpose was never to resolve conflicts but to create them, never to limit power but to enable it (Mamdani 1996, 110). And in fact, “state law enforcement tended to rob custom of its diversity, homogenize it, and equate it with the boundaries of the tribe.” (184). With this European appropriate of African law, ethnicity became of categorical importance in land claims. The first constitution was bestowed on, and not created by, Nigerians in 1914 with the amalgamation of the British protectorates, a land consolidation enterprise (An-Na’im 2003, 212). Martin Chanock finds that Nigerian law was aimed primarily at helping Europeans secure their land rights well before that though, and largely through fomenting ethnic warfare (Chanock in Mann & Roberts 1991, 61).

Conversely, a different perspective emphasizes the role Africans have had in shaping the very European law that was bestowed upon them.  This perspective sees Africans and Europeans as engaged in an ongoing mutual construction of a fluid collection of rules and norms. Even Mamdani admits that ethnicity does not just function in a top-down manner as a means of rule, but also that it is and always has been an organizing principle in resistance. This notion is undergirded by sociolegal research that emphasizes understudied forms of resistance in Africa.

An analysis of Kenyan marriage disputes that tend to favor women’s victory in court demonstrates how those women have utilized law in a manner most beneficial to them, and at that same time have had a hand in shaping it. More specifically, these discursive courts offer sites for the complex reworking of gender relations, which creates possibilities for significant changes in social relations (Hirsch 1998). Thus, these courts have becomes sites of protest for women (Sally Falk Moore in Lazarus-Black & Hirsch 1994). Merry sees too that courts can serve as a mode of resistance to social practices such as domestic violence, but such resistance must be framed in the terms of the law itself, allowing protest only within the hegemonic categories of the law (Merry in Lazarus-Black & Hirsch 1994).

A study of the bandits of the Chad Basin shows how West African bandits have generated an “ethics of illegality” etched out by unregulated commerce that exists not as a form of resistance to the state, but in tandem with it.  In fact, “unregulated economic activity and road banditry are necessary entailments of the state in so far as they circumscribe new forms of economic rents and political constituencies. However, the state is also a necessary entailment to these activities insofar as they are dependent upon relations forged with customs officials, governors, mayors, and the police or gendarmerie” (Roitmann in Comaroff and Comaroff 2006, 250). This study speaks to the reciprocity of African law and society.

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Resistance (III): The Expansion of Culture—Developing World Movements and Gender

Posted on July 15, 2015 | Leave a comment

The focus on the cultural dynamics of resistance paved the way for analyses of social movements in the global south and for a focus on mobilization and gender specifically. In a study of the former, Clifford Bob asked what inspires powerful transnational networks to spring up around particular movements. He aimed to demonstrate that hard calculations of costs and benefits in the competitive marketplace for recognition and aid appear to outweigh sympathy and emotion in determining which of the world’s myriad of oppressed groups profit from globalization (Bob 2005). The book underscores the elements of competition over cooperation, interest over principle, and strategic and structural advantage over the justice of a group’s cause. Paradoxically though, his “global civil society approach” notes the emergence of principled forces arrayed against various injustices. These principled forces play a large part in the story of transnational advocacy networks (TANs).

In their grounded theory study, Keck and Sikkink concentrated on these TANs, groups often omitted from traditional social movement research, that have proliferated across the globe.  In some ways their narrative is rationalist in nature. TANs use techniques such as information politics and leverage politics. They engage in creative use of strategic information and are employed by NGOs in sophisticated political strategies for their campaigns.  On the other hand, they also employ culturally symbolic politics and accountability politics. They all have principled ideas at their core as well as the belief that individuals can make a difference. TANS often advocate for purely moral causes that are not their own and causes in which they, at least initially, don’t have much of a stake. Furthermore, the authors point out that the biggest challenge to the environmental movement is lack of a “face of victimhood” while the greatest strength of gender-based violence movements is that there is an instinctive, transcultural repugnance of “practices that result in bodily harm to vulnerable individuals” (Keck & Sikkink 1998, 195). In other words, activists attract outside participants and supporters partly by globalizing their rhetoric to make it seem as sweeping as possible rather than particular and contingent (Jasper 1997, 292). So, although Keck and Sikkink cited rationalist scholars such as Tilly and Tarrow, their account is largely cultural.

Fully embedded in the cultural camp, Sally Merry has emphasized the “translation” necessary for gender violence activists navigating both international law and their local communities in the developing world. NGO workers must frame their issues in a manner acceptable to global north donors at world conferences, legal hearings, briefings, and UN meetings, all while speaking in the lingua franca of international human rights, English. Additionally however, activists must then “translate” those same global human rights laws into local social movements and rights awareness through cultural transformation and mother tongue communication (Merry 2006).

merry

Along with the research on social movements outside the West, gender has come to the fore as an important dimension of social movements studies. Espoused by Bahati Kuumba, Susan Staggenborg, and Verta Taylor, this lens assumes that gender is a basic organizing principle in human society and that gender roles, relations, and inequalities impact social processes in complex ways. The power, resource, and status differentials between women and men in broader social structures like economies and political systems, as well as in individual lives, must be taken account at each stage of the social movement analysis. Furthermore, it assumes that gender interacts with other systems of stratification, such as race, ethnicity and sexuality, which mediate the institutional context, organizations, and collective identities and strategies of movements (Taylor 1999, 26). Social movement outcomes can be both liberating and subordinating for women at the same time.  Gender hierarchy is so persistent that, even in movements that purport to be gender-inclusive, the mobilization, leadership patterns strategies, ideologies, and even the outcomes of social movements are gendered (Taylor 1999, 9). Sites of resistance can also be sites of exclusion, such as when many women were left out of anti-apartheid struggles (Meth 2010).

To this end, there is now increased emphasis not only on the role women in social movements, but also of non-Western women as well.  Ifi Amadiume shifts the discussion of social movements from the usual gender-neutral state-civil society paradigm (alá Mamdani’s Citizen and Subject) to the concept of women’s anti-power, anti-state movements. In other words, these are political struggles which are not out to wrest power from anyone, but simply to defend and maintain their autonomy. African women’s movements have been a perfect example of these anti-power efforts, struggling against domination and violation without seeking to take power or resources from others. Women have struggled to defend their autonomous organizations, as well their structures or systems of self-rule since the colonial era and continue to do so today (Amadiume in Mamdani & Wamba-dia-Wamba 1995, 35-60).

Women’s unique forms of mobilizations have only recently been the subject of increased study. Overall, the rationalist explanations for resistance strategies that focus on structure and opportunity ignore the largely female ways of mobilizing that include grassroots networking and organizing people (Christiansen-Ruffman 1995). The dominant literature has gendered the political as “male,” emphasizing the importance of top-down speech-making over organizational bridging, that latter of which is more common in women’s activism (Robnett 1997). When women are political in their own ways it is viewed by academics and laypeople alike as “working for their communities” and not using conscious political tactics. Tarrow argues that politics of order (non-violent sit-ins) and disorder (roadblocks) are women-friendly while politics of violence are male and this has been overlooked (Kuumba 2001).

Four scholars claim that regardless of how women choose to mobilize, their best chance for organization always comes after a conflict.  Conflicts are politically empowering to women because women do not have as many male incumbents to contend with since many of those men have fallen to violence.  Conflict also offers women an opportunity to mobilize on one side of the struggle and thus empowers them, and women are not willing to give this up just because the conflict has ended. Moreover, in post-conflict environments, Western international donations go up and with those the pressure to include women in politics increases as well. Their last explanation is long recognized in the work on post-WWII gender dynamics: women take up men’s business roles in conflict and want to protect those business interests during peace as well (Tripp, Casimiro, Kwesiga, Mungwa 2009).

For an excellent perspective on The Women’s Colloquium in Liberia, the only African country with a female head of state, please see:

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Resistance (II): A Cultural and More Emotive Perspective

Posted on July 14, 2015 | Leave a comment

A change in rationalist modeling of how resistance functions was preceded by those espousing a more cultural and emotive perspective at least a decade earlier. The first cultural analysis to emerge on the framing of resistance movements was not incompatible with notions of opportunities. This stressed the effort that goes into symbols creation, establishment of solidarity, and portrayal of grievances. Framing, including identity shaping, is an important process that determines who joins a movement based on whether issues resonate with potential recruits, the media, outside leaders, and the public at large. Acknowledging that framing was a central dynamic in understanding social movements, Benford and Snow focused on how collective action frames have been conceptualized, framing dynamics and processes, contextual factors that constrain and facilitate framing, as well as framing outcomes (Benford and Snow 2000). They later agreed with Oliver and Johnston that frames and ideology are definitionally and analytically distinct entities that merit studying in their own right, and that the relationship between frames and ideology needs to be elaborated further. Snow argued for the study of identity frames as both dependent and independent variables, as well as stressed the dearth of scholarship on frame transformation and diffusion of identities (Snow in Snow, Soule, & Kriesi 2004, 391).

Framing and identity activation are culturally contingent, and culture is now widely accepted as being key to understanding social movements. For one, identities may be taken for granted, but in other instances activists must convince recruits of their cultural identity to get them to join, or those identities may be culturally constructed during the movement (Goodwin & Jasper 2003, 103). James Jasper has been prolific in linking culture and emotion. He writes about “the satisfactions of protest that derive from highly emotional, often ritualistic, collective activities.  These are some of the most striking achievements of a movement, a vibrant culture that gives participants a strong sense of movement identity, and internal movement practices that yield immense solidarity.” Protestors can care about reinforcing their subculture and networks as much as about their publicly stated, instrumental goals (Jasper 1997, 209). This identity activation and formation is both a cultural and emotional experience for many mobilizers.

It is so strong in fact, that such emotions can even overcome challenges to resource mobilization and can be much stronger impetuses than traditional political opportunities for getting a movement started (Jasper 1997, 292). Emotions also answer the question of why individuals continue in a social movement when it becomes clear they could quit and become a free-rider (Goodwin & Jasper 2004).

Interestingly, Francesa Polletta has argued that even structures are in part cultural. Past literature has tended to see culture as subjective, malleable, and enabling of protest, as being mobilized by the powerless to challenge structure. All of these have been described as being opposite of the political structure model, but should not be. Culture shapes our perception of reality and therefore our behavior, which in turn shapes social movements. Aspects of culture such as collective memory, perception of state repressive capacity and legitimacy, and personal identity give form to collective action. Culture helps activists to discern possible strategies for mobilization, e.g. what strategies would be socially acceptable or not (Polletta in Goodwin & Jasper 2004, 97-109).

A James Jasper talk:

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Resistance (1): An Economic Perspective

Posted on July 13, 2015 | Leave a comment

An analytically sound assessment of Niger Delta politics would take not only the oil state and law into account, but the vast body of literature on resistance as well.  Initially, social movements were largely regarded as being unpredictable mobs of emotional rioters, which has clearly proved not to be the case. In 1965, Mancur Olson brought economic rationality to the subject by arguing that individuals are self-maximizers who will mobilize once the potential benefits outweighs the high costs, in other words, when there are enough “selective incentives.” Although his account failed to explain how large groups with a higher mobilization costs than small groups still manage to organize, and failed to solve the “free-rider” problem, his seminal work inspired subsequent social movement theory by posing important questions about the conditions that determine both the degree of groups’ mobilization and how individuals decide to join.

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In the following decade, Resource Mobilization Theory was first ushered in by Mayer Zald and John McCarthy who agreed with Olson’s economic view but focused on the rational nature of organizations rather than individuals.  Social movement organizations (SMOs) were described as business firms that utilized political and financial resources in competition with other SMOs (Zald & McCarthy 1979, Introduction). These scholars, joined by Charles Tilly, Jo Freeman, and Gary Marx, stressed the importance of movements seizing political openings provided by the state or elites. They all argued that the best way to understand collective behavior is to study how social movement organizations acquire and use resources, and that most of these resources comes from elite “sponsors,” e.g. churches, labor unions, NGOs, etc. In this model, there is little emphasis on the individual participants and long-term actions are not accounted for. There is also not a clear definition of “resources” and there is an obfuscation of the concept of grievances. There is difference between objective social conditions and their subjective perception, and this difference is not clarified (McAdam 1999, Introduction).

Political Process Theory first emerged in the 1970s to focus on the interaction between mobilizers and the state, while emphasizing the foremost role of political opportunities in explaining and when and how a social movement operates. Doug McAdam and Sidney Tarrow (a student of Charles Tilly) continued to adhere to rationalist interpretations of social movements, but saw movements as part of normal politics. In this model, it was not just the movement against the state, but the movement being influenced by and responding to the state. Three factors were seen as crucial to the generation of social resistance: level of organization within the aggrieved population (“organizational readiness”), collective assessment of the prospects for success (“insurgent consciousness”), and the political alignment of groups within the larger political environment (“opportunity structure”). Contrary to the previous school of thought, advocates of PPT saw that some resources can be detrimental to a movement and they de-emphasized the importance of elites (McAdam 1999, Introduction). This was better than previous paradigms for analyzing long-run political contexts over time as well as demographic or migratory shifts in mobilization. However, Goodwin and Jasper charge that the theory has been stretched too thin to cover too many cases, and has thus lost analytic potency.  Plus, it suffers from selection bias in choice of cases and ignores the fact that social ties may constrain as well as encourage activism (Goodwin & Jasper 1999).

Tarrow's Power in Movement

Tarrow’s Power in Movement

Several publications that include work on “framing” demonstrate that the economic explanations, namely Resource Mobilization Theory and Political Process Theory are still strong but not necessarily dominant. In 1996, McAdam, McCarthy and Zald published a compilation of comparative essays with three sections. The first two, on political opportunities and mobilizing structures, the nuts and bolts of their perspective, are unsurprising topics of study for them. However, the third section on framing demonstrates that rationalists had to contend with the scholarship on the newer cultural and emotive accounts of social movements. Sidney Tarrow’s Power in Movement argued that contention is more closely dependent on the POS than by the persistent social or economic factors that people experience. These opportunities, he wrote, depend on state strength, prevailing strategies, and repressive capacity. However, he too included work on framing. Then in 2001, McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly, traditional structuralists, engaged in a theoretical reorientation of their past work and even pointed out its inadequacies (McAdam, Tarrow, & Tilly 2001). They admitted that political opportunities, master frames, and structures offer a static view of movements that are unable to deal with the transforming and contingent nature of variables. Their newer emphasis in this comparative study was on mechanisms and processes.

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Can Kenya make the “youth bulge” a source of strength, not a threat?

Posted on October 1, 2012 | Leave a comment

Africa Health Dialogue

Population momentum: Fertility rates fall, but global population explosion goes on

The reality of falling fertility rates while global ‘population explosion’ goes on is depicted in the Figure above. The relentless growth in population might seem paradoxical given that the world’s average birth-rate has been slowly falling for decades. Humanity’s numbers continue to climb because of what scientists call population momentum. As a result of unchecked fertility in decades past, coupled with reduced child mortality, many people are now in their prime reproductive years, making even modest rates of fertility yield huge population increases. This according to John Bongaarts of Population Council in New York translates to adding more than 70 million people to the planet every year, which has been happening since the 1970s. The African continent is expected to double in population by the middle of this century, adding 1 billion people despite the ravages of AIDS and…

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The Ogoni and Andoni Conflict

Posted on March 29, 2012 | 13 comments

Português: Monolito Shell

I typically try to triangulate my blog posts by checking with several different sources on most things I write. However, for the few posts about my fieldwork in Ogoniland I purposefully won’t be doing that. I am trying to process the data that my subjects have provided me with on its own merit.  In trying to solve the puzzle of how and why Niger Deltans choose the mobilization strategies they do, I am trying to view their communities and the state from their perspective. Intentionally, these posts may be biased, but this one is particularly so because I am merely relaying information I was told by Ogonis. In other words, this is a purely Ogoni account and readers should also do outside research on the Andoni perspective, which will differ.

In Ogoniland one of my preferred political events to ask my interview subjects about is the conflict they had with the neighboring Andoni community from 1993-1994. Ogonis had been “looking for trouble” (a common Nigerian term) for a year or two before this, as Ken Saro-Wiwa had returned from abroad to try to mobilize the Ogonis to assert their rights against oil exploitation by Royal Dutch Shell in partnership with the Nigerian state. He had led marches, sit-ins, and rallies.  Churches in the area had begun to use services as a time for praying to God to assist the Ogonis in their struggle.  In contrast to other groups who sought jobs, social amenities, money or other positive rights from companies and the government, the Ogonis were unique.  They were the only group demanding autonomy in the form of their own kingdom.  If this could not be realized, then they would settle for their own state within the Nigerian federation. Saro-Wiwa was a learned man who preached to them about the power of the pen.  The Ogoni movement was avowedly anti-violence, which made it difficult for the government to find a reason to clamp down on them.

From the perspective of the Ogonis I have spoken with, the Andonis were coerced by the Federal Government (FG) to create violence that would serve as a pretense for a crackdown.  Most Ogonis are not clear whether Andonis were fed false information about their neighbors, or whether they were paid by the state to start fighting, or if they were simply armed and that was enough to make Andonis lead the initial attack.  Although the Ogonis and the Andonis had lived side-by-side for generations using the same fishing rivers, in mid-1993, probably around September, the Andonis attacked a boat of Ogoni fishermen as they came back from sea. This territorial dispute marked the beginning of the conflict.  As Ogonis tell it, Andonis raided the Ogoni villages where I conducted my interviews, with my second site, Kpean, suffering the worst.  My respondents were unclear whether it was Andonis or actually federal soldiers who committed the acts, but over the next nine months or so half of Kpean’s homes were burned and much of its property destroyed.  Soldiers began inhabiting the houses, as all the residents had fled into the bush.  They would sneak back into the village at night or times when they thought the soldiers were gone in order to grab food or personal effects, or to try to sleep. No one agrees on how many people died, as I just repeated heard, “too many” or “uncountable.” My respondents said that they felt the conflict ended because the Andonis depleted their resources and the federal government no longer feared collective action in the area.

Half of those I spoke with felt the war was started by the state in order to excuse their use of violence in stopping Saro-Wiwa’s movement.  The other half felt that is was purely territorial, because Andoniland offers prime access into Ogoniland’s oil sites. By paying Andonis with weapons and allowing them to plunder their neighbors, the state was buying geographic access to Ogoni oil. No respondents felt that the Andonis had acted on their own.

I think that conflict has forever shaped the way the people of Kpean view their government. Rightly so, they seem to avoid interaction with the state at any cost.  They avoid police, courts, lawyers, soldiers, or national politics.  Most feel comfortable with chieftaincy, but increasingly look to church as a means of problem solving. Pastors have become the sole mediators and the guardians of conflict resolution mechanisms for many clans. Although there have been no eruptions of violence between the communities since there, tensions persist, and pastors simply do not have the power to reign in such conflicts if they escalate.  When the state feels like an aggressor instead of a protector, and chiefs may be suspicious of other chiefs, it seems difficult for communities like Kpean to remain peaceful.

A building in Kpean reportedly burned by soldiers during the Andoni conflict.

The grave in a family compound of a woman killed during the Andoni conflict.

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Posted in Oil Theory, Violence

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