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Notes Wars Do End: Why Conflict In Africa Is FallingIn fact, as I show in a recent piece in African Affairs, looked at since the end of the Cold War, wars are not becoming more frequent in Sub-Saharan Africa. To the contrary: according to the Uppsala Armed Conflict Data Program, the preeminent tracker of warfare worldwide, wars in the 2000s are substantially down from their peak in the early 1990s. Even if one counts an uptick during the past two years, there were about one-third fewer wars in Sub-Saharan Africa in the period compared to the early-to-mid 1990s.
Another prevailing view is that Sub-Saharan Africa is the most war-endemic region. Not so, especially if one looks at the continent’s history since 1960. Wars in Sub-Saharan Africa (compared to other world regions) are not longer or more frequent on a wars-per-country basis. Those distinctions effectively go to Asia, where between wars in India, Afghanistan, the Philippines, and Vietnam, among others, wars are more frequent and longer lasting.
The pattern holds true for extreme cases of mass killing, like Rwanda in 1994 and Darfur in the mid-2000s. Such events are on the decline in Africa; viewed across time, Africa is also not the regional leader of such events on a per-country basis.
My point is not to engage in crude regionalism, but rather to suggest that what often transpires as common sense about Sub-Saharan Africa is wrong.
The bigger point is that we may be witnessing significant shifts in the nature of political violence on the continent. Wars are on the decline since the 1990s, but the character of warfare is also changing. There are today fewer big wars fought for state control in which insurgents maintain substantial control of territory and put up well-structured armies to fight their counterparts in the state—Mali not withstanding. Such wars were modal into the 1990s. From southern Africa in Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, and even Zimbabwe to the long wars in the Horn in Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Sudan to the Great Lakes wars in Rwanda and Uganda, the typical armed conflict in Africa involved two major, territory-holding armies fighting each other for state control.
Today’s wars typically are smaller. They most often involve small insurgencies of factionalized rebels on the peripheries of states. Today’s wars also play out differently. They exhibit cross-border dimensions, and rather than drawing funding from big external states they depend on illicit trade, banditry, and international terrorist networks.
“We may be witnessing significant shifts in the nature of political violence on the continent” One hopes. Funny because a friend sent this to me a while back. It’s an old article, but the timing is great. Glad this new article came out right after I read the old one.
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An infographic depicting the percentage share of formal firms that are owned by women in Africa. Data from the World Bank.
(via ghanailoveyou)
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Notes Portugal's migrants hope for new life in old African colony
It is Wednesday, and 31-year-old Maria Nunes is picking at her husband’s grilled sardines, laughing at a comment from her friend Carlos, across the table. This group of young professionals have gathered at the Associação Portuguesa for their weekly lunch. It is a reunion of sorts, for the group of expatriates to talk about all things Portuguese over the black and white checkered tablecloths.
All eight were born in Portugal but now live in Mozambique.
The southern African country is famed for its prawn curries, balmy Indian Ocean beaches and local jazz, but the former Portuguese colony is experiencing a resurgence in foreign investment – and foreign migrants – as coal reserves are discovered in the north, urban centres develop in a frenzy of construction, and Europe slides further into economic meltdown.
Maria, a freelance graphic designer, and her husband, Ricardo, moved to Maputo in 2006, interrupted by a brief spell in Angola for Ricardo’s work as a civil engineer. The couple say they love Maputo and chose to live there because it is so Portuguese.
“There’s so many new people arriving everyday,” Maria says. “They just keep coming. Four years ago it was very quiet. But two years ago everything changed. It feels like it’s tripled in the last two years. Every week I see new people in the restaurants, the clubs.”
She shakes her head in bewilderment. “My hometown is small, in the middle of nowhere, but there are still three or four people from there who are here.”
Maria says there’s an email group of thousands online, made up of Portuguese expats living in Mozambique and those in Europe who want to make the move. “Every day there’s another CV from Portugal, someone else looking for a job, wanting to come,” she says. And now finding work in Maputo is getting more and more difficult.
Her friend Carlos Quadros, a newly arrived environmental engineer from Lisbon, says: “Things aren’t so good in Portugal, it’s in crisis. There’s no work at all, and if you get work, you don’t get good pay. And it’s going to get worse.”
He says there are many more opportunities in Mozambique, but it depends on your area of expertise. If you’re an architect or engineer, or have technical skills, there are plenty of jobs.
There has been a 30% to 40% increase in the number of Portuguese migrants choosing to move to Mozambique over the past two years, says the consul general, Graça Gonçalves Pereira.
And while Portuguese nationals don’t have to register at the embassy so concrete numbers are hard to come by, she says the population is in the tens of thousands.
I can’t remember who exactly said this, but I remember listening to a professor speak about his vision for Africa. Maybe it was a TED talk. Either way, he said that his vision for the continent is for it to become a place where Europeans, Americans and people from all walks of life could come to look for growth and renewal. And he didn’t mean in a romanticized spiritual way. He meant economically. Jobs, investments, partnerships, a better way of life. This article highlights the lives of a few Portuguese migrants who have moved to Mozambique to escape the stagnating Portuguese economy. As the article shows, Mozambique isn’t by any means the smoothest or most lucrative transition, but it is the beginning of a materializing vision.
Source: The Guardian
