Religion and African Civil Wars

This volume contains an introduction and seven case studies by anthropologists,historians, and theologians. The papers were originally presented at a1999 conference on “Religion and Social Upheaval in Africa” in Denmark.As a result, some of the papers are somewhat out-of-date, although the questionsthey raise are, sadly, just as relevant as ever to the continent’s currentsituation.As Niels Kastfelt points out in his introductory essay, the authors rejectany approach that seeks to understand African civil conflicts in terms of a“New Barbarism,” an irrational manifestation of “tribal” or religious atavism.This strategy, which is perhaps most typical of journalistic accountsbut also finds some support among academics, clearly constitutes an obstacletoward any meaningful comprehension of the phenomena in question. Ina similar vein, they equally reject any notion of a “conflict of civilizations”or that African civil wars can be explained in terms of the incompatible religiousvalues of Christianity, Islam, and indigenous African religions.Rather, their papers provide a detailed account of the local context in a historicalperspective by focusing on the political, economic, and explicitlyreligious phenomena.Indeed, the lines of cleavage in many of these cases are not defined inreligious terms. As a result, the nature of the relationships between “religion”and the civil wars in question are so disparate that the volume does notquite hang together. For example, René Devisch’s paper on Kinshasa is notreally about civil war, but rather about the effects of the collapse of stateauthority and the formal economy, both of which unleashed rampant violencein the city but also led to the emergence of independent Christian healingcommunes as a sort of refuge

Barbarism · Christianity · Context (archaeology · Indigenous · Islam · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · African history and culture analysis · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History · Law · Philosophy · Religion, Society, and Development · Religious studies

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  Open Access•David Frankfurter•Comparative Studies in Society…•2025

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