DISCUSS THREE CONFLICT IN AFRICA & THREE CONFLICT OUTSIDE AFRICA THAT NIGERIA HAS HELPED TO RESOLVE

INTRODUCTION

The African continent is the most ethnically divided societies (Posner 2005). This is because the colonial enterprise created artificial states in Africa through joining together different groups. The colonial masters did nothing to create effective State institutions that will mediate the resulting conflicts between the groups which were forcefully merged together into fragile political entity (Nasongo’s 2015). The colonialism had no plan for effective Statehood post-colonialism in Africa but only organizing the extraction of resources in the African continent. This situation may be the reason why many African conflicts may be silenced but remain largely unresolved. As Zartman (2000). The End of the cold war, especially in the 1990s and 2000s, coincidentally witnessed an accentuation in Africa of the incidence of intrastate conflicts – horizontally between different socio-ethnic and cultural aggregates within a national territory, and vertically between groups who feel excluded and marginalized from existing power structures on the one hand, and the central authority on the other (Egwu, 2007).

DEFINITION OF CONFLICT

“Conflict is the pursuit of incompatible interest and goals by different groups. Armed conflict is the resort to the use of force and armed violence in the pursuit of incompatible and particular interest and goals.” (Francis 2007) It is an inevitable product of cohabitation or co-existence of individuals or people in society struggling for limited values or resources as against countless desires. In his conceptual approach, Bakut defines conflict as “the pursuit of incompatible goals or interests by different groups or individuals” (Bakut, 2007). According to him, all humans or groups of humans have goals and interests which may be different with the goals and interests of other groups. Sometimes conflicts become inevitable when these groups confront each other in the process of achieving their goals. It is noteworthy to understand that even though conflicts may be seen as a threat to peace, it is not all conflicts that are a threat to peace. It is only the negative action taken to resolve the conflict that represents the threat to peace. “The term ‘negative’ here connotes action that entails injuring other people or destroying their property in the attempt to resolve the conflict: for example, the use of arms (armed conflict) to resolve the conflict in one’s favour which may result in mass killings, murder or even genocide of innocent and unarmed civilians.” (Ibid)

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