African Unification Front
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Back to Conflict Page
MOST CONFLICT IN AFRICA IS GENERATED BY WATER SCARCITY
Hydro-Conflict is at the bottom of most localized low level land conflicts in Africa. Hydro-conflict generally manifests as a land dispute...but people and communities are contesting access to wells, irrigation channels, and fertile wetlands. This kind of conflict can be resolved by implementing economic and social development policies compatible with water resources of Africa, and by implementing water policies compatible with the global objectives of Africa. Failure to manage these limited stresses means that they escalate, usually by copting the authorities to take sides in escalating actions.
Moreover, once incidents happen the chaotic reporting and intepretaion does not lend itself to easy resolution.
Many divided society conflicts have roots in the indigenous/settler dichotomy, especially where the settlers disposed of the indigenous as the ruling elite, but they are in themselves insufficient explications of the root causes of why conflict emerges in some multiethnic societies and why it does not in others.
Other conflicts are easily limited by short-term political concessions. And others have more complex results when numerous factors converge. This is the case with the central African regional war over mineral deposits in the DRC, compounded by ethnic rivalry, imperialism, food and water scarcity, dictorship, territorial ambitions, genocide and the failure of governance.
The literature is limited on why some conflicts are more amenable to settlement - not resolution - than others. Each conflict follows its own contradictory impulses, hostage to myth and history, distortions of reality, imprisoned in misrepresentation, warped perceptions, and insatiable demands for revenge that are the legacy one generation bequeaths to the next. In some, the long duration of the conflicts leads to “the evolution of social mechanisms to regulate and control the relationships [between the parties in conflict], and unable either to remove each other and unwilling to assimilate, they gradually evolved forms of relationships which regulated rather than resolved their antagonisms.”
In Africa such social controls evolved under slavery. Following this period, acceptable levels of political instability and low level hostility became the norm. There was no pressure on leaders and followers and to engage in the intense dialogue that is inevitably necessary to resolve the historic conflicts, as had been in more distant African past (this is attested to by several treaties such as the Baqt of 652 AD, and other documents.
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