Warfare in independent Africa

With his new book Warfare in Independent Africa, William Reno joins the many authors trying to better understand intrastate war. A large proportion of that literature looks for macro-level variables that are linked to the incidence of conflict, through their impact on rebel motivation. This results in claims ranging from the omnipresent greed-grievance debate -with Paul Collier (2000) as a prominent proponent of the greed hypothesis and Frances Stewart’s theory of horizontal inequalities (2002) offering perhaps the most nuanced grievance story – to alternative accounts like Homer-Dixon’s work (1994) on resource degradation and population growth.