The Roy A. Rappaport Lectures: A Socialist Peace? Explaining the Absence of War in an African Country

"A Socialist Peace? Explaining the Absence of War in an African Country"

This series of four lectures presents different parts of a book-length analysis of the politics, history and culture of the West African territory that came to be known as the Republic of Guinea. The book grew out of the question many Guineans and West African neighbors of Guinea have asked about why all six of Guinea's neighbors have experienced civil conflict while Guinea has not. This, despite the fact that many people feel that Guinea had more reasons than its neighbors why it "should have" experienced war or separatist insurgency. Guinea's 26-year experience of socialist rule may provide part of the answer. While the socialist government was intrusive and highly coercive, it also forged a sense of national identity and unity qualitatively different from anything existing in neighboring non-socialist countries. The study thus attempts to unravel the paradox of a peace that issues from a state's violence against its own citizens; a socialist habitus that provides the antidote to political schisms the state itself exacerbated.

1. Understanding and Explaining the Absence of War

How do you explain the dog that doesn't bark? Counterfactual questions have an infinite number of possible answers, but social scientists still attempt to distinguish more from less plausible answers to them. Such explanations can serve as important steps in formulating provisional models of how the world works through abductive reasoning. Using materials from the history of Guinea and studies of the causes of civil war, I argue that the case of Guinea contradicts the existing explanations for the onset of civil war, and thus calls for a new model. Rather than start from war, I suggest that we begin with cases like Guinea's in which societies produce fragile peace against long odds. What is different about such places? I argue that it is from the fine-grained evidence typically used by ethnographers and historians that we stand the best chance of building a theory of how societies choose peace. Beginning from such models, we may also find new ways about thinking about what dynamics and conjunctures result in war.