African Conflicts and Big Man Politics (2009-2011)

Mats Utas, and many others

Funded by the Swedish Defence University

In the aftermath of an armed conflict in Africa, the international community both produces and demands from local partners a variety of blueprints for reconstructing state and society. The aim is to re-formalize the state after what is viewed as a period of fragmentation. In reality, African economies and polities are very much informal in character, with informal actors, including so-called Big Men, often using their positions in the formal structure to reach their goals. This project shows how important informal political and economic networks are in many of the continent’s conflict areas. Moreover, it demonstrates that without a proper understanding of the impact of these networks, attempts to formalize African states, particularly those emerging from wars, will be in vain.

The origin of this project came from below. When studying foot soldiers in the civil wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone, I found upward ties were important. During the war years, these ties were chiefly with commanders, but in its aftermath, many new relations with senior people were also formed out of mutual interest. Seniors were frequently called Big Men. In many ways, such relationships resembled patron-client relations but were more flexible, less durable and more complex than generally suggested in the social science literature. Such differences were even more marked during conflict and wars. When I, in early 2009, was asked to head the Africa programme at the Swedish Defence University, I found a place to start developing this idea. I approached some of the best conflict scholars I knew and they contributed with chapters for an edited book: “African Conflicts and Informal Power: Big Men and Networks”

Within this project I also did fieldwork on Big Somali businessmen in Nairobi and Dubai who had become wealthy during the civil war in Somalia. Except for what I used in the introduction of the above-mentioned book, I ended up not publishing this material. I also used some of my Somalia findings in a piece on radicalisation published together with Henrik Vigh:  

Radicalized youth: oppositional poses and positions In African Insurgents: navigating an evolving landscape. Eds. Böås, Morten and Kevin Dunn. Boulder/London: Lynne Rienner. 2017. Pp 23-42.

Another outcome of these years was that I moved out of the anthropological comfort zone (where you tend to limit your expertise only to places where you have done long-term fieldwork). I started using my conflict knowledge to discuss and eventually write about conflicts elsewhere on the continent, including the Sahel:

Special issue of the Strategic Review for Southern Africa, Post-Gaddafi Repercussions in the Sahel and West Africa. vol 35, No 2. 2013

and CAR

The Crisis in CAR: Navigating myths and interests. In Africa Spectrum, vol 49, no. 1, 2014. Pp. 69-77.

Another article related to this theme is:

West Side Boys: military navigation in the Sierra Leone civil war. In Journal of Modern African Studies vol. 46, no. 3, 2008. pp. 487-511.