لنستخرج كنوزا من المعرفة و الإبداع و العلم و الأفكار
Conclusion
The unresolved, long history of inter-communal clashes, especially in the colonial and post-colonial eras, combined with political missteps and repeated mistakes related to counter-insurgency tactics against the territorial advances of the West Africa branches of al-Qaeda and the Islamic State toward the Gulf of Guinea, could trigger significant violence between several communities in the region. There is, therefore, an urgency to raise more awareness about this pressing issue.
The growing and mutually reinforcing intersections of historical, political, and security triggers of inter-community violence seem destined to result in long-lasting catastrophes. In his book Making and Unmaking Nations: War, Leadership and Genocide in Modern Africa, Scott Straus, a professor of political science at the University of Berkeley, shows that grievances and traumas associated with inter-community violence can last for generations.71 Straus’ investigations on Rwanda in the post-genocide era demonstrate that the mutually reinforcing intersections between local struggles and political insecurity could lead to historical and social fractures that are difficult to recognize in time and reconcile over time.72
As our article has highlighted, inter-communal violence is just a different expression of a much larger set of intersecting issues rooted in political marginalization, exploitative central governance, climate change, violent actors’ agendas, and economic stagnation in rural areas. Inter-community violence often merges with other drivers of instability, such as rising terrorist movements, rival gangs, land-related hostilities, and religious tensions, exacerbating the general level of internal violence.73 In Nigeria, long-term territorial disputes exist between indigenes and settlers, notably between the Zangon and Kataf communities in the Kaduna State, or between the Hausa-Fulani nomadic shepherds and the Beromn, Anaguta, and Afizere farmer communities in Plateau State.74 This violence is strongly connected to the business interests of local political elites as well as inter-religious tensions.
Nonetheless, drawing on an in-depth reassessment of inter-community violence in West Africa from a regional perspective, this analysis makes clear the pivotal role of politics in creating, exacerbating, and losing control over manipulated societal divisions in all the countries under scrutiny. This peril is incumbent, and its consequent wounds can stay open for centuries, having a prolonged ripple effect on political and social stability both at the national and regional levels.
The problem of inter-community violence in West Africa is becoming more intricate with time, and yet few political efforts toward reconciliation have been attempted so far — and most have been unsuccessful. Instead of promoting robust policies, governments with poor political legitimacy and a loose grip on domestic fractures have limited themselves to timid awareness-raising speeches, calling on their national populations to reconcile. That happened in Burkina Faso in 2022, when the then-ruling authorities severely condemned the spread of community-based hate messages through WhatsApp and Facebook that incited community violence against Fulbes.75 Although acknowledging and rebuking the rhetoric was important, the government failed to effectively deter this plan for mass violence.
In Mali, Tuareg and Fulbe communities are regularly painted as “criminals” and “terrorists”76 on social media and subjected to disinformation campaigns,77 with little to no reaction from the authorities.78 In Ghana too, community-based political parties have abused the term “terrorist” to discredit their opponents and legitimize harsh military responses; they have extensively used social media to promote their violent discourse.79 Hence, we consider the role of social media in the diffusion of violent discourses and in expanding tensions between communities, at a national and a regional scale, to be critical and requiring further investigation.
As politics is often one of the main causes of inter-community violence, the issue needs to be urgently addressed at local, national, and regional political levels.
Despite inconsistent, and often limited, political responses, some good practices aimed at solving inter-community divisions stand out. These positive examples involve creating and enforcing transitional justice mechanisms and social cohesion networks, as happened in Nigeria, Cote d’Ivoire, Western Mali, and Burkina Faso. Local non-governmental stakeholders have been advocating for a paradigm shift in the political response of national central administrations, supporting the adoption of targeted policies to safeguard national stability through intersecting diplomatic, military, and social measures. Grassroots attempts to gather like-minded people under the same national identity rather than community-based identity are found online, such as some Guinean groups on Facebook that advocate for a national unity government treating Malinkés, Fulbe, and Soussou as one and overcoming the present community-centric cleavages.80
Nigeria hosted the so-called Kabara committee, a body established to settle the ongoing farmer-herder violence hampering local stability.81 Drawing on the African tradition of transitional justice mechanisms, the Kabara committee mediated disputes without relying on excessively punitive measures, with the involvement of community stakeholders from traditional and religious leaders, local authorities, and youth and women’s associations.82 Cote d’Ivoire promoted a similar pattern of action, trying to act in advance and preventing instead of reconciling tangible inter-community divisions. In this regard, a specific project to avoid community-based crises and violence and their further exacerbation due to terrorist uprisings was launched in Korhogo in 2022.83
Western Mali and Burkina Faso benefitted from the RECOPA network, a civil society organization intended to bring together local farmers, settled herders, and the municipal government to overcome difficult land tenure obstacles and secure pastoral routes and grazing areas in a peaceful manner. Some other states preferred to establish new institutional bodies, political measures, and legal reforms to deter central marginalization. For instance, the 2019 Mauritanian government adopted some structural measures to balance the scarce presence of Haratins and Afro-Mauritanians compared to Beydan communities within the national institutions, providing the three groups with the same percentage of representatives. Similarly, Ghana established two institutional bodies to smooth community-based tensions: the national electoral commission and the Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ). These two institutions were meant to work as deterrent instruments against community-based cleavages, monitoring acts of violence throughout the country and ensuring regular elections to prevent post-electoral contestation and turmoil.
Although these measures have had a beneficial impact, they were all too limited in nature, scope, and means to address and heal inter-community cleavages in a truly comprehensive manner. They often over-rely on traditional authorities; instead, mediation attempts should also embrace a top-down approach and not only a bottom-up perspective, involving political leaders at national levels in the process of reconciliation while establishing a broader push for peace at the local and regional levels. It is key to ensure that political actors do not have a personal interest in triggering further turmoil and fostering ideological reinvention to consolidate their political legitimacy on different grounds. Zooming out from the community perimeter, a more fruitful exchange of de-escalatory and reconciliatory best practices should occur across the region. As Dr. Ba, the director of the Center for Analysis on Governance and Security in the Sahel, pointedly noted:
Regional lessons can be drawn from the situation in Mali: There needs to be an agreement and a global vision of peace, with coherence at a national and local level. For community reconciliation and peace, therefore, there is an absolute need for a national strategy for dialogue that describes the red line of what is and is not acceptable.84
To be more effective, reconciliation efforts between communities should adopt a multi-layered approach that does not only involve high-ranking positions or solely target community members. Different individuals affected by or engaged in various forms of inter-community violence — and possibly those benefiting from the perpetuation of violence — should all become actors of the reconciliation process.
