Coffee Break: Armed Madhouse – Africa’s Enduring Wars

Armed conflict across Africa is routinely explained as the aftermath of colonialism, the meddling of external powers, the spread of transnational jihadism, or—at the crudest level—as the eruption of tribal conflict. Each of these narratives captures something valid. None of them, on its own, comes close to explaining the pattern, persistence, and variation of armed conflict across the continent. The result is simplistic discourse that is morally satisfying, politically convenient, and strategically useless.

What is striking about Africa’s wars is not simply their frequency, but their diversity. The conflicts of the Sahel, Sudan, eastern Congo, Ethiopia, Somalia, and Nigeria differ markedly in structure, actors, and trajectories, even when they share surface features such as weak states, porous borders, or external intervention. Treating these wars as instances of a single underlying pathology—colonial legacy, ethnic animosity, terrorism, or climate stress—obscures more than it reveals.

A more accurate account begins with an unfashionable premise: Africa’s conflicts are the product of multiple interacting causes, operating simultaneously and in different proportions. Colonial inheritance matters, but it does not operate in a vacuum. Post-colonial governance, political economy, demographic pressure, security-sector dynamics, resource rents, and external shocks all interact to produce distinct conflict patterns. Wars persist not because Africa is trapped in an endless past, but because brittle political systems are being stressed from multiple directions simultaneously.

A typology of contemporary African conflicts

Any serious analysis must begin with description. What follows is not an exhaustive catalog, but a schematic inventory of the dominant conflict regimes currently shaping the continent.
State fragmentation and elite power struggles characterize conflicts such as Sudan, South Sudan, Libya, and the Central African Republic. In these cases, the central issue is not social breakdown but competition among armed elites for control of state resources. Violence functions as a bargaining instrument within fragmented sovereignty.

Insurgency in weak peripheral states defines much of the Sahel and northern Mozambique. Here, jihadist movements are best understood not as primary causes but as vehicles that exploit marginalization, predatory security forces, and the absence of credible governance in rural peripheries.

Protracted war economies dominate eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, where violence persists not because victory is impossible but because conflict itself has become a mode of political and economic organization. Armed groups function as extractive actors embedded in regional and global markets.

Center–periphery and identity-based state crises are visible in Ethiopia and Nigeria, where the state remains intact but its legitimacy is contested by ethnic, regional, or religious blocs. These conflicts are political struggles over inclusion and power distribution, not failures of state existence.

Near-complete state substitution, exemplified by Somalia, represents a distinct category altogether: the collapse of central authority followed by the emergence of alternative governance structures rooted in clan, commerce, and coercion.

This diversity alone should dispel the notion that Africa’s wars share a single cause. They do not. They share overlapping pressures, combined in different proportions. The conflict causes listed in the table below are indicative of the multiple, interacting pressures that shape conflicts, rather than definitive explanations of any single case.

The human toll exacted by these wars has been devastating. In most cases, the majority of deaths have come not from combat itself, but from displacement, famine, and the collapse of basic governance—costs that compound long after headlines fade.

Refugee camp in Somalia

Proportional causation and the limits of colonial explanations

Colonialism undeniably shaped Africa’s political geography, institutional inheritance, and patterns of extraction. But it did not determine outcomes uniformly, nor does it explain why similarly colonized societies diverged so sharply after independence.

Zimbabwe illustrates the point. Rhodesian rule was brutal and exclusionary, but it did not leave behind a structurally ungovernable state in 1980. Zimbabwe inherited functioning institutions, productive agriculture, and educated elites. Its subsequent collapse was driven primarily by post-independence political choices—elite predation, violent land seizures as tools of regime survival, and the deliberate destruction of institutional capacity. Colonialism created constraints; it did not dictate the result.

The Hutu–Tutsi genocide in Rwanda makes the same point in more tragic form. Colonial administration hardened ethnic categories and embedded grievance, but genocide was not an automatic product of decolonization. It was a deliberate, state-directed political project undertaken under conditions of war, regime insecurity, and international abandonment. Colonialism shaped the raw material of identity; post-colonial elites weaponized it.

Somalia sits at the opposite extreme. Colonial legacy explains relatively little about its post-1991 trajectory. The country’s collapse and reorganization were driven by clan structures, Cold War militarization, and the absence of a shared national political settlement. Treating Somalia as a colonial failure missed the reality that a non-state order was emerging—one that external actors repeatedly disrupted.

The lesson is not that colonialism was irrelevant, but that causes operate in different proportions. Treating one factor as universally decisive guarantees analytical error.

Why misdiagnosis persists

If Africa’s wars are this varied, why are they so often misread? Part of the answer lies in the institutional limitations of U.S. foreign policy. The American diplomatic apparatus was built to manage relations among bureaucratized states, not layered political systems where power operates through informal networks, armed groups, and negotiated legitimacy. Elections, constitutions, and formal ministries are routinely mistaken for the locus of authority.

There have always been individual diplomats and analysts who understood these dynamics. What the United States has never developed is a sustained institutional capacity to translate that understanding into policy. Knowledge remained personal and perishable, while decision-making gravitated toward ideological templates: Cold War anti-communism, post-Cold War democratization, and post-9/11 counterterrorism. Each framework flattened reality differently. All of them privileged action over understanding.

Somalia as the textbook failure

Somalia is the clearest example of why monocausal stories fail. For more than three decades, external actors have treated the country as a humanitarian emergency, a failed state, a terrorism incubator, and a laboratory for state-building—often all at once. Each framing justified intervention. None engaged the political reality that emerged after the collapse of central authority: a fragmented but functional order rooted in local governance, commerce, and coercion.

Yes, colonial partition and border-making mattered, but they did not mechanically produce state collapse. Somalia’s post-independence trajectory was shaped by interacting forces: Cold War militarization, authoritarian rule and patronage, the politicization of clan networks, recurrent drought and price shocks, and the sudden withdrawal of external support that had been propping up coercive capacity. When the center broke, it did not simply “disappear.” Authority fragmented into competing governance forms—local administrations, business-backed security arrangements, clan-based dispute systems, and later Islamist courts—each offering partial order in exchange for loyalty, taxation, or protection.

The early 1990s collapse also illustrates the political economy of humanitarian catastrophe. Famine was not only a weather event; it was a market and security event. Armed actors controlled roads, ports, and aid corridors, turning food into revenue and leverage. That reality made outside intervention inherently political: delivering aid meant choosing who would gain advantage from the logistics of survival. External actors often treated Somalia as a morality play—either a rescue mission or a cautionary tale—when it was, in fact, an intensely material contest over rents, mobility, and coercive access.

Somalia also exposes the recurring U.S. error of treating counterterrorism as a strategy rather than a supporting tool—disrupting networks while leaving untouched the locally negotiated, incentive-driven foundations of legitimacy that determine whether authority consolidates or fragments.

What U.S. policy should have been

A more appropriate U.S. approach to Somalia would have required reframing the problem along three interlocking dimensions, instead of oscillating between humanitarian intervention and counterterrorism.

Treat Somalia as a political economy, not a rescue mission.

The central task was not to restore a unitary state on paper or conduct episodic relief operations, but to reshape incentives within an economy of conflict—supporting authority where security, dispute resolution, and commerce aligned, and undermining it where toll-taking and rent extraction dominated.

Subordinate force to legitimacy rather than substituting for it

Military power could disrupt violent actors, but it could not generate durable authority. The persistent error was to treat counterterrorism as a strategy rather than as a supporting tool. Security assistance should have been explicitly conditioned on civilian protection and institutional performance, with the understanding that legitimacy in Somalia is negotiated, incremental, and locally grounded. When force becomes the organizing principle, governance becomes incidental—and instability self-perpetuates.

Anchor intervention in regional and material realities.

Somalia’s instability has never been purely internal. External patrons, neighboring rivalries, and cross-border economic flows continuously shaped outcomes on the ground. A serious policy would have treated regional diplomacy, aid logistics, and market functioning as core instruments of stabilization, not auxiliary concerns. Humanitarian delivery, in particular, required designs that minimized capture and war rents, acknowledging that “neutral aid” in a fragmented security environment is often an illusion.

The U.S. policy mistakes in Somalia thus illustrate a broader pattern: a persistent failure to engage complex political economies as they are, substituting episodic humanitarianism and narrow security perspectives for sustained, incentive-aware statecraft.

U.S. airstrikes in Somalia, 2025 — continuing a decades-long pattern of ineffective military intervention

The Cost of Simplistic Diagnosis

The greatest danger of monocausal thinking is not analytical error but policy folly. Simplistic explanations create the illusion that complex conflicts are easily resolvable. They invite great powers to intervene with tools designed for problems that do not exist in the form imagined.

When Africa’s wars are framed simplistically as terrorism problems, tribal pathologies, or proxy contests, crude interventions follow accordingly—arming favored factions, propping up brittle regimes, and freezing conflicts into persistent stalemates. African societies then bear the human costs in death, destruction, and displacement. External powers accumulate sunk costs, strategic distraction, and institutional decay. While these failures are not uniquely American, U.S. policy is distinctive in the scale of its unsuccessful interventions and the confidence with which it applies ill-fitting templates.

This intellectual deficiency was evident when the Trump administration publicly mischaracterized South Africa as a site of racial genocide. This was not merely a factual error. It was the culmination of decades of analytical decline, in which complex political systems were reduced to slogans and grievance narratives.

South Africa’s problems are real and severe. They are not genocidal. That such a misreading could be articulated at the highest level of U.S. government illustrates the deeper failure this article has traced: the loss of any sustained capacity to understand African political realities on their own terms. The intellectual posture of U.S. foreign policy toward Africa has become the cognitive equivalent of TL;DR—a refusal to engage complexity that guarantees misunderstanding.