Politics and Violence in Eastern Africa ─ The Struggles of Emerging States

Over the fifty years between 1940 and 1990, the countries of eastern Africa were embroiled in a range of debilitating and destructive conflicts, starting with the wars of independence, but then incorporating rebellion, secession and local insurrection as the Cold War replaced colonialism. The articles gathered here illustrate how significant, widespread, and dramatic this violence was. In these years, violence was used as a principal instrument in the creation and consolidation of the authority of the state; and it was also regularly and readily utilised by those who wished to challenge state authority through insurrection and secession. Why was it that eastern Africa should have experienced such extensive and intensive violence in the fifty years before 1990? Was this resort to violence a consequence of imperial rule, the legacy of oppressive colonial domination under a coercive and non-representative state system? Did essential contingencies such as the Cold War provoke and promote the use of violence? Or, was it a choice made by Africans themselves and their leaders, a product of their own agency? This book focuses on these turbulent decades, exploring the principal conflicts in six key countries – Kenya, Uganda, Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia and Tanzania.

This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Eastern African Studies.

David M. Anderson is professor of African history at the University of Warwick. He has published widely on the history and politics of eastern Africa, including The Khat Controversy (2007) and Histories of the Hanged (2005). He is editor of The Routledge Handbook of African Politics (2013). He has recently completed a study on the Cold War in Africa and is engaged in wider research on the history of empire and violence.

Oystein H. Rolandsen is a senior researcher at the Peace Research Institute, Oslo. He is a specialist in the history of eastern Africa with particular reference to the Sudan. His most recent book is Guerrilla Government: Political Changes in the Southern Sudan during the 1990s (2005). He has published in leading journals, including the Journal of African History, Review of African Political Economy, and the Journal of Eastern African Studies. He is now, together with Dr. Martin Daly, writing a general history of South Sudan.