Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Monday, January 10, 2011

Maybe Africa's borders aren't so bad

James Fearon, in a post on The Monkey Cage blog disputes the assertions that European-drawn borders in Africa cause more conflicts than the cultural/ethnic/linguistic borders in other parts of the world. How well would your students analyze the argument?

Fearon is Theodore and Frances Geballe Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University.

The Bad Borders Meme

In general I think Jeffrey Gettleman does a great job reporting on Africa for the NYT, but his piece in the Week in Review today (A Colonial Curse Comes Up for a Vote) kind of set me off.

It begins "More than any other continent, Africa is wracked by separatists," and then immediately suggests that the bad borders drawn by the colonial powers are "a prime reason that Africa remains, to a striking degree, a continent of failed or failing states." He then relates some different theories for why African Union members have accepted the idea of recognizing a new southern Sudanese state, despite the long wariness of the African Union (and its predecessor, the OAU) about "opening Pandora's box." He wonders if this will start a trend and suggests that might be a good thing.

Africa is not wracked by separatists more than any other continent. In fact, the interesting thing is just how rare separatist movements have been in Africa, especially given how ethnically diverse African countries are relative (on average) to the rest of the world…

Separatist conflict has evidently been less common in Africa than the rest of the world. This is still true in the last 10 years, though maybe there has been some uptick, it's hard to say. If you compare by region, separatist conflict has been much more the norm in Eastern Europe/former Soviet Union and in Asia than in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA)...

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Labels: cleavages, history, Nigeria, politics