This unique volume seeks both to historicize and to deconstruct the pervasive, almost ritualistic, association of Africa with forms of terrorism as well as extreme violence, the latter bordering on and including genocide. Africa is tendentiously associated with violence in the popular and academic imagination alike. Written by leading authorities in postcolonial studies and African history, as well as highly promising emergent scholars, this book highlights political, social and cultural processes in Africa which incite violence or which facilitate its negotiation or negation through non-violent social practice. The chapters cover diverse historical periods ranging from fourteenth century Ethiopia and early twentieth century Cameroon, to contemporary analyses set in Kenya, Tanzania, Nigeria, Cameroon, the Ivory Coast and South Africa. It makes a crucial contribution to a revitalized understanding of the social and historical coordinates of violence - or its absence - in African settings. Violence and Non-Violence in Africa will be of interest to students and scholars of African history and anthropology, colonialism and post-colonialism, political science and Africanist cultural studies.

This book makes an important contribution to the conflict literature and to new ways of thinking about agency and social life in fragile contexts. It does this by engaging with often ignored peace infrastructures. In this book, the contributors highlight different ways in which non-violence is deployed by Africa’s youth to navigate difficult violent contexts. Drawing on empirically grounded case studies from the Central African Republic to Zimbabwe, this book explores how similar (or indeed the same) social infrastructures can be deployed for both violence and non-violence and the important factors that drive many youth to take the non[1]violence option even when order appears to collapse around them. The authors also explore how, for instance, systems of organizing survive violent disruptions to the so-called rhythms of everyday life, and, when they do, how they are then repurposed by youth to help them survive violence.

Offering insights on violence in conservation, this timely book demonstrates how and why the state in Africa pursues conservation objectives to the detriment of its citizens. It focuses on how the dehumanization of black people and indigenous groups, the insertion of global green agendas onto the continent, a lack of resource sovereignty, and neoliberal conservation account for why violence is a permanent feature of conservation in Africa.

This book provides a unique perspective, at once scholarly and fully engaged, on the political violence in South Africa during 'The Time of the Comrades' in the mid-1980s. The work of a group of social scientists and professionals, whose own work and thinking have been profoundly affected by the political crisis of that time, it provides an in-depth research and analysis as well as critical reflections on the difficult political and theoretical issues raised by political violence and the struggle in South Africa.

For more than a century, from 1900 to 2006, campaigns of nonviolent resistance were more than twice as effective as their violent counterparts in achieving their stated goals. By attracting impressive support from citizens, whose activism takes the form of protests, boycotts, civil disobedience, and other forms of nonviolent noncooperation, these efforts help separate regimes from their main sources of power and produce remarkable results, even in Iran, Burma, the Philippines, and the Palestinian Territories. Combining statistical analysis with case studies of specific countries and territories, Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan detail the factors enabling such campaigns to succeed and, sometimes, causing them to fail. They find that nonviolent resistance presents fewer obstacles to moral and physical involvement and commitment, and that higher levels of participation contribute to enhanced resilience, greater opportunities for tactical innovation and civic disruption (and therefore less incentive for a regime to maintain its status quo), and shifts in loyalty among opponents' erstwhile supporters, including members of the military establishment. Chenoweth and Stephan conclude that successful nonviolent resistance ushers in more durable and internally peaceful democracies, which are less likely to regress into civil war. Presenting a rich, evidentiary argument, they originally and systematically compare violent and nonviolent outcomes in different historical periods and geographical contexts, debunking the myth that violence occurs because of structural and environmental factors and that it is necessary to achieve certain political goals. Instead, the authors discover, violent insurgency is rarely justifiable on strategic grounds.