Search results

The family, as the most basic social institution, serves as the bedrock of any society. Family structures worldwide have undergone various changes in their forms, nature, and functioning, including Abia state, Nigeria. The Nigeria Civil war is one of the symbolic events attributable to changes in the Abia family structure. Changes in the family structure could influence conjugal relationships. The study explored the dynamism and changes in the family structure and conjugal relationships at different eras of the family life cycle in Abia society. A qualitative research method was used in this study. Twenty-two participants (4 life history and 18 in-depth interview participants) were recruited in this study with purposive sampling techniques. Using an archival checklist, life histories, and an in-depth guide, information was elicited on family structure and conjugal relationships. The study was subjected to thematic analysis. The findings revealed dynamism and changes in family structure, with polygyny being most prevalent prior to the civil war, the emergence of step-parent and single-parent families during the civil war, and monogamy being most prevalent, with increasing single-parent and step-parent families contemporaneously. The conjugal relationship shifted from having concubines (acceptable and practised covertly) to having side chicks (been practised covertly). The Nigerian civil war had an impact on the observed dynamics in family structure during the civil war and immediate post-civil war. Other factors such as religion, education, civilization, and migration, among others, influenced the contemporary Abia family structure. Understanding family structure dynamics could be useful in solving issues regarding family and conjugal trajectories.

What kinds of support do interstate rivals provide to domestic actors in ongoing civil wars? And how do domestic actors utilize the support they receive? This chapter answers these questions by comparing Iranian and Saudi military and non-military (mediation, foreign aid and religious soft-power promotion) support to the Houthis and to the Government of Yemen (GoY) during the Saada wars (2004–2010) and the internationalized civil war (2015–2018). It also focuses on the processes through which the GoY and the Houthis have utilized this support for their own strategic purposes. This chapter applies a structured, focused comparison methodology and relies on data from a review of both primary and secondary sources complemented by 14 interviews. This chapter finds that there were less external interventions in the conflict in Saada than in the internationalized civil war. During the latter, a broader set of intervention strategies enabled further instrumentalization by domestic actors, which in turn contributed to the protracted nature of the conflict. This chapter contributes to the literature on interstate rivalry and third-party intervention. The framework of analysis is applicable to civil wars that experience intervention by rivals, such as Syria or Libya.

The United States of America is on the verge of a possible revolution in civil-military relations in an era marked by increased defensive alertness stemming from the attacks of 11 September 2001. As we anticipate the normalization of terror as a way of life, we are witnessing a paradigmatic shift from the use of violence towards some political end to the use of violence as an end in itself (Jenkins, 2001). 1 It is tempting to frame our analysis in terms of the broader notion of asymmetric warfare, since the arguments we make in this paper may be applied to a wide range of settings, including those in which vastly unequal forces are pitted against one another and one side may make use of irregular fighters employing unconventional tactics. However, this would serve only to shift the emphasis away from our central argument. Terrorism may be a form of asymmetric warfare, but what distinguishes it is the fact that it intentionally targets civilians, and that among civilians, it is indiscriminate in the devastation it wreaks. Terrorism is important because of the way in which it socializes danger, breaking down the barriers between combatant and noncombatant and subjecting all to the worst of harrowing and potentially lethal attacks. It is this socialization of danger produced by terrorism, in turn, that is critical in assessing whether and how civilian and military authorities elect to treat its use against their own societies not as a crime, but as an act of war. Bioterrorism in turn, as we argue below, has unique attributes that distinguish it from other forms of terrorism.1 And where, for most nations, homeland defense is the primary mission of the armed forces, the United States had to establish a new cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security due to the primarily expeditionary nature of American armed forces for the past half-century. The military has been a unique institution in modern societies. It has acted as the agent for the state’s possession of a monopoly on the means of large-scale organized violence and war-making. The establishment of a second executive agency responsible for homeland security makes the equation more complex. As a result, ever greater attention must be given to the balance of civil-military relations in American society.

Purpose: National business groups in conflict countries may mitigate the civil war or do the converse. When the economy is mainly point-sourced, which means it mainly exports mineral-based products and/or narcotics, the business community (apart from small-businesses associated with services) is likely to be more pro-war, particularly, if the other side may gain control of the lootable commodities, as in secessionist wars. This tendency will be reinforced the closer are business and political ties, shorter the time horizons are and more difficult it is to make credible commitments to peace. If the economy exports mainly agricultural products excluding those mentioned above or manufactures (diffuse or manufacturing) the commercial case for peace is stronger because of the diffused nature of the core business activity. Even so, there will be some groups who profit from war contracts and arms deals. The peace lobby is likely to dominate in societies where business and political actors are more sharply separated, as well as in countries that have longer time horizons and better institutions of commitment. The pro-peace business lobby may have a stronger case in secessionist wars compared to rebellions, as the former are more likely to be longer and more intractable to purely military solutions.

Purpose – This chapter aims to explore the causes of civil war in West Africa, including the perspectives of those directly involved, both those involved voluntarily and those involved against their will. To this end, we examine the three contiguous war – afflicted coastal countries of Sierra Leone, Liberia and Ivory Coast and as a counterweight, Ghana which has escaped civil war.

Methodology – Brief country case studies are used to explore the motivations of leaders and followers which often diverge. This chapter examines four West African countries:•Sierra Leone and Liberia, which have suffered classic brutal, ‘third war’ civil wars (Holsti, K. (Ed.). (1996). Wars of the third kind. In: The state, war and the state of war. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).•Ivory Coast, once seen as the West African ‘beacon of stability’ (Royce, E. (2003). Testimony. US House of Representatives Subcommittee on Africa, 2nd February, p. 12) but now suffering a seventh year of civil conflict.•Ghana, the counter case, which has so far survived multiple military coups without descending into national conflagration.

To demonstrate the basic features these countries share in common and to suggest some areas where they diverge, we present core socio-economic data in Table 1.

The respondent data on which much of the analysis is based was collected by Dele Ogunmola from individual interviews, and focus group discussions. In the case of Ivory Coast, there was also an e-interview with a medical missionary who experienced the early stages of the war. Given the tense nature of the situation, for both the individual interviews and the focus groups the selection of participants was purposive. People were selected who were willing to talk about their involvement and could represent a range of different roles and experiences. Thus, for example, the Makeni focus group quoted was recruited at Sumbaya village, which was virtually razed by the rebels. Minor warlords were interviewed but not, regrettably, randomly selected. We also refer to the interviews of ex-rebels conducted in 2009 by John-Idriss Lahai, a former member of the Sierra Leonian Civil Defence Forces and current PhD Student at the University of New England.

Findings – Interviewing in these countries still requires courage on both sides, and while we accept that respondents (especially those at risk of prosecution) may well prevaricate, the overall impression is one of the striking frankness. Most argued that the war was messy and the participants had mixed motivations. The findings confirm that, while grievances play a significant role in providing the fuel for West African civil wars, the greed of both national and international players serves to prolong them. Though Sierra Leone and Liberia experienced opportunistic wars, the Ivory Coast is torn apart over the definition of citizenship. Ghana has survived due to leadership which facilitated economic growth, curbed corruption and prioritised provision of basic services.

Limitations – This is not the place to detail the multitude of coups, wars and treaty negotiations that make up the troubled history of the region (see Adebajo, A. (2002). Building peace in West Africa: Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea-Bissau. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Parallel timelines for each country would demonstrate many interactions across the region, such as the spread of subaltern coups, but at the cost of presenting a long and confusing history. It is enough to stress that these colonially defined countries are linked across borders that are porous to ideas, rebels, refugees and diamonds alike.

A growing literature links oil to conflict, particularly civil war. Greed/opportunity, grievance, and weak state arguments have been advanced to explain this relationship. This chapter builds on the literature on oil and conflict in two important ways. First, I examine a novel dependent variable, domestic terrorism. Much is known about the effect of oil on the onset, duration, and intensity of civil war, though we know surprisingly little about the potential influence of oil on smaller, more frequent forms of violence. Second, I treat oil ownership as a variable, not a constant, coding oil rents based on ownership structure. This is contrary to other related studies that assume oil is necessarily owned by the state. Using a large, cross-national sample of states from 1971 to 2007, several key findings emerge. Notably, publicly owned oil exhibits a positive effect on domestic terrorism. This positive effect dissipates, however, when political performance and state terror are controlled for. Privately owned oil, on the other hand, does not correlate with increased incidences of terror. This suggests that oil is not a curse, per se.

Moore (1966) once argued that the American Civil War was a fundamentally “bourgeois” revolution. As such, Moore's account falls in line with much of the larger literature on democratization, which emphasizes the class dimensions of democratic expansions and transitions, but is largely silent on how party politics are implicated in those processes. Such approaches miss a great deal of the party, inter-elite and discursive dynamics that are crucial to understanding the origins and consequences of democratic change. This chapter seeks to discern the impact of mass party formation and political discourse on modern routes to democracy through an examination of mid-19th-century Chicago politics. It holds to Moore's conclusion that the American Civil War was indeed a bourgeois revolution, while demonstrating that the trajectory of party politics before, during and after the war challenges Moore's interpretation of how class forces were mobilized in the American case. Partisan shifts, for example, worked at turns to weaken and strengthen the rhetorical and organizational basis of working-class mobilization, suggesting that democratization and the class coalitions that give rise to it are shaped and re-shaped by the context of partisan struggle.

In 1967, Robert N. Bellah famously argued that there existed an “American Civil Religion,” which was distinct from churchly religion and captured the “transcendental” dimension of the American project. In this chapter, I revisit the civil religion concept and reconstruct it along more Weberian lines. Specifically, I argue that the civil religion tradition is one of three competing traditions for thinking about the proper relationship between religion and politics in America; the other two are religious nationalism and liberal secularism. Whereas liberal secularism envisions a complete separation of the religious and political value spheres, and religious nationalism longs for their (re)unification, civil religion aims for a mediating position of partial separation and productive tension. Following Bellah, I argue that the two central strands of the civil religion tradition have been covenant theology and civic republicanism. The body of the chapter sketches out the development of the tradition across a series of national foundings and refoundings, focusing on the writings of leading civil theologians from John Winthrop and John Adams through Abraham Lincoln and John Dewey to Martin King and Barack Obama. The conclusion advances a normative argument for American civil religion – and against liberal secularism and religious nationalism. I contend that liberalism is highly inclusive but insufficiently solidaristic; that religious nationalism is highly solidaristic but insufficiently inclusive; and that only civil religion strikes a proper balance between individual autonomy and the common good.