African wars

Pinker’s Chapter 6 supplement — Africa’s wars are not explained by poverty, ethnicity, or religion alone

Pinker’s 2011 synthesis places many late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century conflicts in a low-income arc running through Central and East Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. But he rejects the simple story that poor people inevitably fight over scarce resources. War also produces poverty; oil and diamonds can create a resource curse by concentrating control and financing armed rivals; and weak, unstable states can make small insurgencies viable. In the Fearon–Laitin analysis he summarizes, civil war was associated with large populations, mountainous terrain, new or unstable governments, oil exports, and perhaps a high share of young men—not, after the stated controls, with ethnic or religious diversity, language discrimination, or income inequality.

Figure 6-5 — Armed-conflict sites in 2008 and countries containing the “bottom billion.” The map is a dated cross-section, not a current African-conflict map and not a causal test. Pinker’s larger mechanism is reciprocal: poverty, weak state capacity, predatory government, contraband, foreign sponsorship, and war can reinforce one another. That makes the relevant question which mechanism is operating in a particular conflict, not which religion or ethnic identity appears in a table. Chapter 6 synthesis · Poverty and civil-war risk, PDF pp. 429–431 (file not included in this release) · Figure 6-5, PDF p. 432 (file not included in this release) · Anocracy, the resource curse, and insurgency, PDF pp. 436–440 (file not included in this release)

Here is a table of major wars and conflicts in Africa that have occurred in the 21st century, based on the provided search results:

This table includes major wars and insurgencies that have resulted in significant casualties and displacement in the 21st century across different regions of Africa. The death tolls are estimates from various sources and may vary. [1][5][6][7][10][11][12]

Citations:
[1] https://ruafrica.rutgers.edu/resources/graduate-and-post-doc-research/african-wars-in-the-21st-century
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_conflicts_in_Africa
[3] https://www.elgaronline.com/edcollchap/book/9781802207798/book-part-9781802207798-8.xml
[4] https://press.un.org/en/2023/sc15249.doc.htm
[5] https://issafrica.org/pscreport/psc-insights/african-conflicts-to-watch-in-2022
[6] https://online.norwich.edu/online/about/resource-library/five-major-african-wars-and-conflicts-twentieth-century
[7] https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/01/12/africa-conflicts-violence-threaten-rights
[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Congo_War
[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Civil_wars_of_the_21st_century
[10] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries-currently-at-war
[11] https://www.britannica.com/list/8-deadliest-wars-of-the-21st-century
[12] https://pressbooks.ccconline.org/the-world-1500-present/chapter/africa-in-the-21st-century/
[13] https://www.nrc.no/news/2022/june/the-worlds-ten-most-neglected-crises-are-all-in-africa/
[14] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/2/21/a-guide-to-the-decades-long-conflict-in-dr-congo
[15] https://www.crisisgroup.org/global/10-conflicts-watch-2024
[16] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/heres-list-ongoing-wars-around-world-2024-sorted-size-rodolfo-delgado-bybme

Here is an updated table that includes the religion and type of government for each side in the major wars and conflicts in Africa over the last five years:

This table now includes the religion and type of government for each side involved in the conflicts. The information is based on the most relevant and available data.