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- Convenors:
-
Niels Boender
(University of Warwick)
Bethany Rebisz (University of Bristol)
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- Chair:
-
David Anderson
(University of Warwick)
- Format:
- Panel
- Streams:
- History (x) Violence and Conflict Resolution (y)
- Location:
- Philosophikum, S69
- Sessions:
- Saturday 3 June, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Berlin
Short Abstract:
Colonial insurgency and counterinsurgency shaped decolonisation across Africa. This panel, bringing together new scholarship, will explore how civilians, colonial officials and guerrillas all participated in processes of future-making, with significant post-colonial and contemporary resonances.
Long Abstract:
The panel hopes to bring together a new generation of scholars working on the practices and legacies of colonial insurgency and counterinsurgency. Across the continent from Algeria, through Kenya and Guinea-Bissau, to Namibia, the process of decolonisation was marked by multi-sided violence and various practices of future-making. From high-modernist villagisation to guerrilla bureaucracies, both insurgents and counterinsurgents jockeyed to shape post-colonial states, ideas, and identities. New scholarship, much of which emanating from young scholars on the continent itself, has come to move beyond a straightforward military-historical approach to counterinsurgency, to show how everyday citizens interacted with its modernising impulses. African post-colonial states were in diverse ways a product of both the counterinsurgent and insurgent projects, often uncomfortably reconciled by state officials who had been on both sides of the divide.
Future-making provides an important framing for studying the period of decolonisation, by allowing for detailed exploration of the various futures historical actors imagined, and how certain ones became reality. Decolonisation was for many African states a violent rupture, an age of radical flux comparable to the present opportunities provided by technological innovation. This occurred not just in the corridors of metropolitan power, but at the grassroots, where indigenous idioms of freedom intermingled with global currents of ideas . This topic has significant contemporary relevance due to the continuing inter-relation of insurgency, violence, and state-making across Africa, with new visions of the future constantly closing and opening-up.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Saturday 3 June, 2023, -Paper short abstract:
This paper explores how record removal/destruction was not only a priority of outgoing colonial administrations recently engaged in counter-insurgencies, but how archival creation was of concern to independent governments, formed in the wake of such warfare.
Paper long abstract:
Not only was record removal and destruction an urgent priority of outgoing colonial administrations recently engaged in counter-insurgencies, but archival creation and the establishment of counter histories was of concern to emergent independent governments, formed in the wake of such warfare. In this way, the control over the past was of particular, and at times discordant, relevance in the future-making efforts of competing powers engaged in colonial (counter)insurgency. This is especially true in the Kenyan case. Taking a long view of colonial (counter)insurgency, wherein the colonial efforts to remove incriminating evidence and curate a favorable paper trail in situ were the direct results of counter-insurgent record-keeping policy, the establishment of Kenya’s National Archives just two years after constitutional independence can be seen as an act against the removal of the past. This paper explores the ways in which colonial officers, Colonial Office administrators, Kenya’s inaugural cohort of independent leaders, civilians and white settlers navigated the location and meaning of the counter-insurgent past -vis a vis archival preservation- in the forging of their respective post-colonial futures.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the prospects and pitfalls of present and past state-sponsored vigilantism in Somalia. It argues that the ongoing clan-based mobilisation will not produce durable security future if it is not accompanied by a concerted effort for a negotiated settlement.
Paper long abstract:
On May 15, 2022, Hasson Sheikh Mohamoud was elected president of Somalia for a second time, having lost the seat in 2017 to the former prime minister, Mohamed Abdullahi Farmajo. Soon after his victory, the president outlined his priorities on restoring law and order in Southern Somalia, which is plagued by political instability and conflict. At the heart of his strategy lay the provision of support to a clan-based vigilantes, Ma’awisley, who voluntarily took arms against an Al-Qaeda-affiliated militant rebel group, Al-Shabaab, formed in 2004 by Afghani jihad veterans. While this seems to have worked so far as the recapturing of significant territories from the grip of Al-Shabaab is concerned, knowledge of and speculation of what this holds for the future is limited. This paper speaks to this gap by exploring the historical dynamics of vigilante mobilisations in Somalia to make sense of contemporary strategies to defeat Al-Shabaab, and future implications for state-making. In so doing, it outlines how the modern state-building history in Somalia is replete with insurgencies against the state, how the state's responses to these insurgencies remained identical across time and space, and how such responses have, almost invariably, failed to produce the futures the state actors had imagined. Relying on key informant interviews, secondary data and personal observations, the paper argues that the ongoing clan-based mobilisation will not produce durable security future if it is not accompanied by a concerted effort for a negotiated settlement.
Paper short abstract:
This paper traces the development of quotidian restrictions and punishments in the Mau Mau conflict, examining how, under the influence of the negotiated relationship between low-level officers and their loyalist counterparts, these everyday control became an indelible part of future state-building.
Paper long abstract:
In the tumultuous years of the Mau Mau emergency, control over the majority of the non-active Kikuyu population was mitigated through the negotiated relationship of regional administrators and their local loyalist counterparts, designing and implementing controls and punishments with the aim to be effectual, applicable and vitally, understood, by the local population. A factor key in justifying their wide use.
As the conflict progressed and minds turned to the future of the colony, these relationships and the controls they oversaw underwent a paralleled evolution, with an increased emphasis on development and state-building, quotidian punitive restrictions and punishments would become part of localised efforts to establish loyalist communities as the legitimate expression of native interest and set up these groups for hierarchical predominance in the peace to come.
In a narrative usually enraptured in accounts of violence, this paper instead argues that vital to understanding the colour and composition of the structures of control which would come to power in Kenya's independence less than a decade later is an appreciation of transformative effect this conspiration of administrators and loyalist had in the formation and direction of everyday punishment and control on localised constituencies, tracing important changes to these restrictions which would have long-term and significant effects on the make-up of Kikuyu society as a whole.
Paper short abstract:
By qualitatively perusing archival documents coupled with oral sources and literature review we ask: what entailed South-Africa’s counter insurgency campaigns and its impacts along the Kavango population in Namibia and what lessons does it hold on to future population mobilities along boundaries?
Paper long abstract:
We explore South Africa’s counter insurgency campaigns, its socio-economic and political impacts on the civilians along the Kavango River in Namibia. While there is vast knowledge on South-African counter insurgency campaigns generally, there is a paucity of in-depth study on South Africa’s counter insurgency campaigns along the Kavango River. This timely engagement will be a valuable contribution to existing knowledge on counter-insurgency histories, providing a civilian experience and perspective. The paper employs qualitative research methods by perusing various archival documents coupled with oral sources and a review of literature. Centrally, we ask: what entailed South-Africa’s counter insurgency campaigns and its impacts on the population and what lessons does it hold on understanding future population mobility along war frontiers? We discuss South Africa’s belief that the Portuguese could never win a war against the insurgency groups and eventually the fear that a Portuguese defeat could potentially enable one of the insurgents, SWAPO, to infiltrate the Kavango River population and influence them militarily, politically, economically and socially. South Africa also feared that SWAPO fighters would eventually establish their military bases inside Namibia. Against this background, South African colonial authorities supported the Portuguese by engaging in counter insurgency campaigns since 1968 when ‘Tjaisa’ controlled settlements were established until by 1976 when the civil war caused mass civilians to flee from ‘Tjaisa’ settlement into Namibia. South Africa, seemingly as a counter insurgency strategy, allowed ‘Tjaisa’ refugees to be resettled onto the Namibian side of the Kavango, an action they previously avoided.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the role of colonial intelligence services in Mozambique’s liberation struggle (1964-1974), and the impact they had on the country’s post-independence political landscape.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines the role of colonial intelligence services in Mozambique’s liberation struggle (1964-1974), and the impact they had on the country’s post-independence political landscape. Deploying a mix of primary and secondary materials, and investigative methods, the paper first examines the two roles the intelligence apparatus performed during counterinsurgency: guide colonial military operations and political repression and generate studies to inform the colony’s policy-making process. The paper then discusses the complexities and shortcomings surrounding the prospective nature of such studies whose purpose was to engender evidence-based actionable knowledge to influence the course of events. The paper concludes by examining the impact of these policy-oriented documents and the forecasts they contain during and after the liberation war, namely in the policy of the newly independent state.
Paper short abstract:
This paper elaborates the concept of ‘coercive reconciliation’ as a useful framework, marrying counterinsurgency to post-war outcomes. It takes as its specific example the Kenyan Emergency, when the British sought to coercively rebuild Central Kenya economically, politically and psychologically.
Paper long abstract:
This paper seeks to re-evaluate late-colonial counterinsurgency in light of the frameworks of reconciliation and future-making, using the 1952-1960 Kenyan Emergency as a case study. Counterinsurgency efforts generally, and late-colonial campaigns especially, ought to be understood as open-ended, future-oriented efforts. While often rolled into in an ad hoc and chaotic manner, their intended outcomes reveal much about processes of state-building and nation-making so crucial to the late-colonial and decolonisation periods. The panoply of coercive measures, often including extreme racialised violence, was always to serve a purpose. Therefore, the conceptually separated frameworks of counterinsurgency and reconciliation ought to be brought together in the concept of ‘coercive reconciliation’.
The Kenyan case specifically is illustrative. Literature on the conflict, especially in the last fifteen years, has emphasised the brutal violence of the colonial state against the Kenyan Mau Mau rebels. Particular stress has been laid on the archipelagic ‘pipeline’ of detention camps and the human suffering in the Emergency Villages. This paper seeks to understand what purpose this violence served beyond the immediate needs of withholding civilian support to the freedom fighters. In particular, it looks at how the colonial state wanted to build a new Central Kenya safe for a further generation of colonial rule, with a transformed economic, political and psychological set-up. Fuelled by ethno-psychiatry and modernisation theory, Kenyans were to be reconciled under a energised ruling class of loyalists. It will end with a discussion of the long-term, post-colonial, legacies of this process.