On the Precipice: Nigeria and a Budding Shi’ite Insurgency

This issue begins with a conceptual article written by the late James Hentz. Colonel Hentz, the founding editor of African Security journal, advances a novel approach to understanding the nature of conflict and war on the continent of Africa. Drawing somewhat on the neo-realist structural theory of the late Kenneth Waltz, Hentz is critical of theories of the proximate or immediate causes of war espoused by many observers of African conflicts. However, he does agree with the general consensus that African states tend to be conflict-prone for a variety of reasons, not the least of which are the artificial nature of these progenies of Western European colonial powers, and the reality that these states were concocted based on the Westphalian territorial state model, in spite of their ethnic heterogeneity. His quibble with the prevailing explanations of why there are so many wars on the African continent has to do with the surface nature of those accounts. Hentz makes the compelling argument that scholars examining the nature of African conflicts need to dig deeper and try to understand underlying causes of such conflicts. Thus, his approach is structural and in that sense one can understand why he draws on Waltz whose theory of the causes of war advances explanatory reasons that are ontologically located in the structure of the international system. But for Hentz, Waltz is both a starting point and a point of departure. Those familiar with Waltz’s seminal work, Man, the State and War, would appreciate that any approach to understanding war will depend on the “level of analysis”. Where one stands on an issue depends very much on where one sits – as the saying goes. For Waltz, one can proffer different explanations for conflict and war if one selects a position from among, what he termed as, the three levels of analysis: the individual, the state, or the international system. Like Waltz, Hentz comes to the conclusion that the most potent explanations for conflict and war are found at the structural level – the systems level. Wars occur because the structure of the system is anarchical (viz., there is no governing authority higher than the sovereign state). There is nothing wrong with looking for explanations of why war occurs, from the perspective of the individual or of the state. But drawing on Waltz, Hentz points out that “not all men are evil and there are different kinds of states, yet conflict is common irrespective of these distinctions.” And, in a sense, both authors are right. If the structure of the system affects the behaviour of the units within that system (states) and the ways in which the individuals within those units behave, then it makes perfect sense to focus one’s attention on the system level of analysis. But, Hentz’s point of departure from Waltz is significant. What happens when the structure of the system affecting the units and individuals is not at the “international” level? What happens if the structure of the African system is different from the structure of the international system? As Hentz argues, the nature of African conflicts and wars is different from the nature of the interstate wars of the Westphalian international system, because the wars that emerge from the Westphalian system are primarily between relatively “strong” states. Many African conflicts do not neatly fit into the Waltzian conceptualization. Indeed, the Westphalian international system can be contrasted with what Hentz calls “the African states system”. The latter has created its own unique premodern “zones of conflict” that differ significantly from the zones of conflict that AFRICAN SECURITY 2019, VOL. 12, NO. 2, 141–143 https://doi.org/10.1080/19392206.2019.1649108