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Nine contributors offer pioneering work on the scope and nature of electoral violence in Africa; investigate the forms electoral violence takes; and analyze the factors that precipitate, reduce, and prevent violence. The book breaks new ground with findings from the only known dataset of electoral violence in sub-Saharan Africa, spanning 1990 to 2008. Specific case studies of electoral violence in countries such as Ghana, Kenya, and Nigeria provide the context to further understanding the circumstances under which electoral violence takes place, recedes, or recurs.
Multiparty elections have become the bellwether by which all democracies are judged, and the spread of these systems across Africa has been widely hailed as a sign of the continent’s progress towards stability and prosperity. But such elections bring their own challenges, particularly the often intense internecine violence following disputed results. While the consequences of such violence can be profound, undermining the legitimacy of the democratic process and in some cases plunging countries into civil war or renewed dictatorship, little is known about the causes. By mapping, analysing and comparing instances of election violence in different localities across Africa – including Kenya, Ivory Coast and Uganda – this collection of detailed case studies sheds light on the underlying dynamics and sub-national causes behind electoral conflicts, revealing them to be the result of a complex interplay between democratisation and the older, patronage-based system of ‘Big Man’ politics. Essential for scholars and policymakers across the social sciences and humanities interested in democratization, peace-keeping and peace studies, Violence in African Elections provides important insights into why some communities prove more prone to electoral violence than others, offering practical suggestions for preventing violence through improved electoral monitoring, voter education, and international assistance.
An analysis of land and natural resource conflict as a source of political violence, focusing on election violence in Kenya.
This book explores the effect of the judiciary on the incidence of post-election violence by political actors across Africa and within African countries. It examines how variation in judicial independence can constrain or incentivize election violence among democratizing states. Using case studies and cross-national analysis, the book shows that variation in levels of judicial independence from a non-independent judiciary to a quasi-independent judiciary or from a fully independent judiciary to quasi-independent judiciary increases the likelihood of strategic use of post-election violence by non-state actors. However, the likelihood of post-election violence is significantly reduced in non-independent judiciaries or once countries' judiciaries become fully independent. The author makes the theoretical argument that, within unconsolidated states, non-state actors that view the judiciary as semi-independent are more likely to engage in post-election violence with the purpose of creating political and professional uncertainty in order to influence assertive behaviour from judges in disputed elections. Consequently, the book argues that semi-independent judiciaries or judiciaries that are neither fully controlled by the incumbent nor fully independent from the incumbent can help explain post-election violence among unconsolidated states, all else being equal. This book will be of interest to scholars of election violence, democratic politics, law and politics and African politics.
Elections have emerged as one of the most important, and most contentious, features of political life on the African continent. In the first half of this decade, there were more than 20 national elections, serving largely as capstones of peace processes or transitions to democracies. The outcomes of these and more recent elections have been remarkably varied, and the relationship between elections and conflict management is widely debated throughout Africa and among international observers. Elections can either help reduce tensions by reconstituting legitimate government, or they can exacerbate them by further polarizing highly conflictual societies. This timely volume examines the relationship between elections, especially electoral systems, and conflict management in Africa, while also serving as an important reference for other regions. The book brings together for the first time the latest thinking on the many different roles elections can play in democratization and conflict management.
This book interrogates the nature of elections and election violence in the African countries. It traces the causes of the governance menace to multiple factors that are not limited to poverty, unemployment, and media. The book documents how election violence cripples the nation-building process across many African countries. Consequently, it reveals that states have lost their manifest destiny of national transformation in Africa because they cannot guarantee that legitimate candidates, who should win elections, due to the widespread manipulation of violence at all levels of electoral engineering. The chapters rely on the cases and changing dynamics of elections and electoral violence in the different Nigerian states. It traces the origins of elections, the nature and patterns of a number of past elections as well as the roles of youth, judiciary, electoral umpire, social media, and gender on the changing nature of elections in Nigeria.
This open access book on the state of peacebuilding in Africa brings together the work of distinguished scholars, practitioners, and decision makers to reflect on key experiences and lessons learned in peacebuilding in Africa over the past half century. The core themes addressed by the contributors include conflict prevention, mediation, and management; post-conflict reconstruction, justice and Disarmament Demobilization and Reintegration; the role of women, religion, humanitarianism, grassroots organizations, and early warning systems; and the impact of global, regional, and continental bodies. The book's thematic chapters are complemented by six country/region case studies: The Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Sudan/South Sudan, Mozambique and the Sahel/Mali. Each chapter concludes with a set of key lessons learned that could be used to inform the building of a more sustainable peace in Africa. The State of Peacebuilding in Africa was born out of the activities of the Southern Voices Network for Peacebuilding (SVNP), a Carnegie-funded, continent-wide network of African organizations that works with the Wilson Center to bring African knowledge and perspectives to U.S., African, and international policy on peacebuilding in Africa. The research for this book was made possible by a grant from Carnegie Corporation of New York.
Democratic transitions in the early 1990s introduced a sea change in Sub-Saharan African politics. Between 1990 and 2015, several hundred competitive legislative and presidential elections were held in all but a handful of the region's countries. This book is the first comprehensive comparative analysis of the key issues, actors, and trends in these elections over the last quarter century. The book asks: what motivates African citizens to vote? What issues do candidates campaign on? How has the turn to regular elections promoted greater democracy? Has regular electoral competition made a difference for the welfare of citizens? The authors argue that regular elections have both caused significant changes in African politics and been influenced in turn by a rapidly changing continent - even if few of the political systems that now convene elections can be considered democratic, and even if many old features of African politics persist.