Conclusion: Secession and the Secessionist Motive into the Twenty-first Century

This work has discussed a conceptual idea of three different waves of secession that have rolled across the continent of Africa since the initial independence of sovereign nations in the late 1950s. The first, the Civil Secessions, offered a unique typology that would quickly ignite a firestorm and then be snuffed out. These secessions are so named because they were attempting to create civil states, states that were multi-ethnic and constructed around a civil structure of laws and institutions. Those that had pursued such projects in Katanga and Biafra understood that international political recognition was the only possible path forward for their political project and structured their secessionist actions around this goal. However, their desires to directly declare and demonstrate their existence as independent states backfired, as in both cases recognition was denied and the perceived need to defend the borders of their nation left them in the path of far more powerful opponents.

The second wave, the Long Wars, proved far more ambiguous than their Civil Secession counterparts. Whereas with the Civil Secessions there was a direct declaration of secession as their motive and the immediate attempt to defend what was now sovereign state territory, the Long Wars drifted through secession and separatism and often blurred the lines where the contestation of sovereignty was actually taking place. Whereas the Civil Secessions were modelled after the negotiated and recognized independence of African states such as Ghana, Nigeria, and Mali, the Long Wars would find their models in the global liberation struggles of the 1950s and 1960s. These have been dubbed the Long Wars because they involved the secessionists’ waging protracted struggles as they husbanded their strength and created parallel governance structures to continue their contestation of sovereignty.1 The extended construction and evolution of these military, political, and even social structures over the long conflicts meant that not only could these conflicts be sustained, but there were at least functional governance structures to take over when these conflicts ended rather spectacularly in success.

The Long Wars found success during a period of rapid political change on both a continental and global scale, and this same changing context helped fuel what has been termed the New Wave of secessions. While structurally the Long Wars had been waged in a very different way than the Civil Secessions, they offered at least a similar vision for their end point: complete secession and the establishment of a multi-ethnic state for their people fighting for their independence. The forces unleashed by the end of the Cold War would mean that, although the New Wave of secessions would be structurally waged in the same way as the Long Wars, their end goal would shift. A combination of resurgent subnational ambitions along with the collapse of state capacity after the Cold War would mean the New Wave of secessions would instead pursue often more openly separatist goals as opposed to secessionist ones, as subnational interest groups looked for more autonomy under the umbrella of weakened state control.

However, as each wave progressed, it can be seen that the actual secessionist motive and the methods by which it was pursued in independent Africa altered over time. The way that secession and separatism were understood underwent a radical change, with the initial political demands of immediate and recognized sovereignty giving way to a more ambiguous process by which the motives often skirted the line between secession, separatism, and irredentism. By the time the New Wave had hit, the very idea of secession had to a large degree drifted away despite the signal successes of Eritrea and South Sudan. This alteration in the secessionist motive was largely driven by a combination of political changes on the continent of Africa as well as African states’ relationship with the global community, but it is important to understand this evolution in order to also understand where the ideas of secession, separatism, and irredentism exist now within the context of the African continent.

The Evolution of the Secessionist Motive

The secessionist motive in Africa was born at the same time as its drive for independence. While certainly the drawing of borders of the colonies and later independent states did not help tamp down the subnational frustrations and ambitions within the states, the drive for multinational, multi-ethnic states following the Second World War meant that almost any borders that existed would see a degree of contestation of political control and sovereignty. However, the drive for independence along the lines of the colonial boundaries did inspire the initial secessionist motive within the now-independent states. The idea that there was an international body of law that demanded self-determination and that demanded respect for the concept of sovereignty meant that those subdivisions within the colonies would believe that their own self-determination and desire for sovereignty must be respected, just as the demands of the larger nationalist fronts of Africa’s had been. In this sense, the early secessionist motive was modelled after the premises of international law that had granted independence to Africa over the late 1950s and early 1960s.2

During this time, this must not have seemed that remote a goal. Most of the nationalist movements in Africa had struggled for years in seeking political control of the colonies they had found themselves in, and following the Second World War these movements saw recognizable movement toward their desires. The major colonial powers of France, Britain, and Belgium all were severely weakened by the war, and Portugal, despite being neutral, had been in decline for decades.3 At the same time the creation of the United Nations as an international governing body, which included self-determination for all peoples within its charter, offered hope that the emerging global order would help dismantle the colonial system that controlled Africa.4 This combination of rising nationalist ambitions and organization,5 weakened colonial powers, and the global acceptance of a political regime that demanded self-determination then managed to enable the dreams of the nationalists in a far more rapid manner than they had ever anticipated. While the colonial powers had imagined they had decades to slowly enact a program of decolonization, within a decade the colonial system was in its initial stages of being torn down across Africa.

Of course, these same factors drove forward the secessionist motives of subnational groups. Groups like the Moïse Tshombe’s Katangans, while working with other nationalist groups for their own larger national independence, questioned whether the redrawing of the continental order could only deal with the political governance of the already-existent colonies. This came into even sharper focus as many of these subnational groups had very different relationships with their colonial powers, relationships that often made the integration into independent state political orders much more difficult. Whether because of the economic development that had occurred in the region, such as with Katanga,6 or the privileged status the population held within the colonial order, such as with the Kel Tamasheq of the French Sahara,7 these groups were not necessarily opposed to their political independence, but were not amenable to the new state order being ushered in by the nationalists. They were already looking for chances to assert their own political independence, especially as many of these groups already had at least a semi-functional political organization to drive forward their ambitions.

These parallel organizations were swept along with the same tides that had driven nationalist motives in the postwar period. The weakening colonial powers, while perhaps not quite as excoriated amongst some subnational groups as they were amongst the nationalist groups, offered the same opportunity for new political leadership within their homelands and real sovereignty as opposed to colonial rule. However, whereas the nationalists were focused on the political control of colonies transformed into sovereign states, this first wave of secessionists were looking at the restructuring of the colonial order into multiple sovereignties. Underpinning these beliefs was the general view that if the European colonial order was to be rejected, why should not the boundaries that system had imposed be rejected as well? This was bolstered by the wording of the new United Nations charter, which demanded self-determination for all the populations of the world. To the secessionists, this was a clear indication that the new global order would not be constrained by elements of the old. Thus, the initial secessionist motive had been informed by the idea that the political leadership of a population could help guide those people through the creation of a new sovereign state, effectively creating new, completely self-determined states on the continent.

This first wave of secessions had unfortunately been very optimistic in its assumptions that the dismantling of the colonial order had ushered in a new era of renegotiation of state boundaries and sovereignty in Africa. Whereas the state as a structure did indeed still represent the default social and political organization on the continent, no existing state accepted the renegotiation of boundaries to create new states. Instead, with limited exceptions, these new attempts to assert political sovereignty and then receive recognition were rejected by all parties involved in the process. Katanga had a brief period of international quasi-legitimacy but lost any support it had with the assassination of Prime Minister Lumumba by Katangan forces. In the rebellion’s wake the international community quickly quashed the legal justifications for secession through a series of United Nations and Organization of African Unity precedents, but the secessionist motive still found a new spark with Biafra. While Biafra could not lean on international law, it had hoped that the instability of Nigeria and the violence of the coups and pogrom would generate sympathy and possible recognition for its secessionist project. However, the door had been closed on secession and the attempt was finally ended in 1970.

While the formal secessionist motive had been effectively abandoned by 1970, with the path to complete political separation on the African continent largely closed off in international legal thought and no longer within the capabilities of any aggrieved subnational group, this didn’t mean that the struggles for political autonomy or separatism were over. Instead, within this new frozen international order, the secessionist or separatist motive entered a far more ambiguous and fluid realm. The states that had emerged in Africa were not necessarily fully functional, but the development of capacity within their borders was largely reliant on external exchange with the developed nations of the world. The keys to this exchange were held by the new nationalist political elite, who managed to effectively make themselves gatekeepers between their own sovereign nation and the increasingly polarized world of the Cold War.8 However, this very ability to gatekeep allowed for the creation of circumscribed networks of patronage that controlled the flow of development within the rest of the new state. This often left marginalized groups outside the limited development taking place even as they continued to exist under the monopoly of legitimate use of violence that the new states maintained. This, combined with often increasingly undemocratic governments, led to a series of clashes with the new states by the subnational groups. However, despite the weakness of the new states, they still were more powerful than their subnational groups and could exert far more deadly firepower in these struggles than any constituent group. This capacity was of course also well subsidized by Cold War patrons that did not want to lose friendly African governments.9 This meant that in order to persist in these clashes the subnational groups necessarily had to pursue quiet, prolonged conflicts.

It was during these prolonged conflicts that the aforementioned ambiguity was explored. While secession had seemingly been quashed as a political goal following the fall of Biafra, that did not mean that it was entirely gone. However, those groups fighting for their own political, social, and economic control locally had fierce debates within their ranks about the official end goal of their struggles, debates that could continue for as long as their struggles did. These debates in turn often meant that the stated goal of a struggle might change from year to year as new leadership or factions ascended to power. For example, the Sudanese Civil War began as a secessionist attempt that eventually saw its leadership realize that secession would be an impossibility within their political context. Instead, the question of regional autonomy and integration into the networks of gatekeeper patronage was raised, leading to separatism being achieved in 1972. However, when these networks of patronage and development failed to be fully realized, the next phase of the conflict saw the re-emergence of, at first, a desire for reform within the autonomous system that the South inhabited. During the course of the conflict, the increasing organization of the Southern fronts and the weakening of the North saw this desire for reforming the earlier agreement instead transform into the re-emergence of the secessionist motive that the rapidly changing geopolitics of the post–Cold War era had made a possibility. This sort of pattern played itself out throughout the longer, evolving conflicts across the continent, where secessionist desires might transition into reform or separatist ones and back, as the capabilities of the combatants and the context within which they struggled changed.

The crushing of the attempts in Katanga and Biafra and the precedents their loss set had largely quashed the secessionist motive as a realistic goal for those groups fighting prolonged insurgencies for their subnational rights. While the idea of secession had re-emerged from time to time throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s during these fights, as noted they often were discarded as an ideal once negotiations with the parent states were underway—or sometimes were even discarded within intergroup rivalries as more capable groups took control and fought for more moderate reforms. This often found a decent amount of success, as local groups could still fight for regional autonomy or a larger reform of the central government that would include them within the networks of development they had been left out of.

This general lack of pursuit of secession as a goal would eventually be overturned as several momentous events occurred that undid the perceptions that had stymied secession as a desired end of these struggles. During the decades of the Cold War it had become patently obvious that the international system would not recognize secessionist states, thus undermining the very reason for which subgroups would pursue secession. Without this recognition, the secessionist region would not have the access to international markets or even political support that would allow them to function for the benefit of their populace. Beyond this, thanks to their access to the international system and the military support of the Cold War blocs, the parent states could call on economic and military strength that could crush all but the most determined of insurgencies.

These perceptions would all be belied or reversed with the end of the Cold War. The idea that no secessionist state would be recognized within the international order was undone during the collapse of the Eastern Bloc. Old states were immediately partitioned and larger unions were split across Eastern Europe, with these new states welcomed into the new world order by the United Nations. For those African groups watching, this was an obvious overturning of what they had always perceived as the blanket condemnation of secession; not only was the international community welcoming secessionist states, but the lone remaining superpower, the United States, was actively encouraging more splits within their former adversaries, citing the ability of the local populations to self-determine their political fates. Perhaps just as important, the end of the Cold War meant that the support that African states had been receiving from the two poles of the struggle to maintain their security capacity was undergoing rapid changes. For those states that had aligned themselves with the Communist bloc, their patrons had now largely collapsed. The Soviet Union was no more, and its successor states had their own problems to deal with due to their own political turmoil and moribund economies. On the other side of the spectrum, those that had been supported by the United States and its Western allies saw their support become conditional not on halting the spread of Communism but now on the emergent security threats of the new global order.10 Allies like Zaire11 found themselves far less critical in the new security priorities of the United States, while those like Sudan found themselves rapidly transformed from allies against Communism to targets due to their ties to fundamentalist Islam. In all of these cases, the capacity of African governments to maintain their abilities to extract, provide, and control were all undermined. This opened the possibility that localized insurgencies could survive and perhaps even thrive against the now weakened parent states. In both cases, the factors that had largely undermined the secessionist motive and driven many more toward reform or separatism had themselves been largely dismantled. While this might have seemed theoretical at first, the success of the Eritrean bid for secession seemed to hinge largely on the weakening of the Ethiopian Derg regime in the late Cold War as well as the direct acceptance of its independence by the United Nations in 1993, signalling that there might indeed be something new afoot on the continent.

Beyond this, there was now another new factor to add to the secessionist motive. Whereas all previous African secessions had largely been built along what might be referred to as civil lines, the events in Europe pointed to the new acceptance of nation-states as the end state of secessionist activities. This meant that the idea of ethnic identities being the basis for whole political sovereign states was now an accepted phenomenon, something that the aversion to ethnic nationalism in the wake of the world wars had previously ruled out. Given that the majority of subnational identities in Africa were based on ethnicities and that many of the existent regimes in Africa saw the deep ethnicization of politics despite their civil state structures, this new acceptance was noted with deep interest. Suddenly, those ethnic groups that had previously been struggling for autonomy or their own access to the network of gatekeepers could instead dream on their own ethno-state, where instead of competing with the groups that had historically held power for a share of the access and networks, they could have control of them in their entirety.

Of course, this did not always mean that subnational groups would drive for their own secession, ethnic or not. Instead, much like during the Long Wars, these still-lengthy struggles would see an evolution of motives and often compromises made as both sides of the conflict often lacked the capacity to force a decisive result. However, while some groups set out for secession and ended up with autonomy under their old parent states, this did not necessarily end their secessionist ambitions, and now it was more than possible to reignite a conflict and continue to push for complete separation following a period of reinforcement and retrenchment. The signal success of the South Sudan showed this was now a potential path forward, where despite significant splintering and an earlier agreement for regional autonomy, secession was eventually achieved along the lines that the long-struggling Southerners had desired from the beginning. At the very worst, these groups could use whatever military successes they achieved to argue for a better deal with their host state—settling for separatism on better terms or a reformed regime. As such, while the new wave would now allow for possible secession, it certainly did not guarantee the secessionist motive and instead far more often saw negotiated reform or separatism as the end state, with the possibility of revision in the future. This paradigm would play itself out into the present day, as those regimes that managed to achieve separatism rarely saw themselves entirely happy with the result, while those few that actually achieved secession quickly found that it was not the answer to the challenges that had initially spurred their extended military endeavours.

Whither the Secessionists Now?

While this work has largely looked at the military conflicts that have taken place to achieve secession, it has to be noted that these are not simply episodic events that begin with shots being fired for a political goal and then end with either a crushing of the attempt or the achievement of secession. The actual driving forces behind the secessionist attempts form as ideologies and ideas long before conflict begins, and even following the cessation of hostilities the idea of secession does not simply disappear. This often is even more complex because, as we have seen, it is often difficult for a secessionist movement to have a completely coherent, accepted, and immutable political goal. Even during and after these conflicts, attempts to achieve a satisfactory end state for any or all sides can often be a far more challenging process than the conflict themselves. On top of this, oftentimes the political project of secession or separatism can intersect or be co-opted by other political projects as the situation changes, making the challenge take on additional dimensions. Given such complexity, although this work has presented six historical case studies for contextualizing secessionist conflicts, it must be asked what the eventual end state of any of them actually has been.

In terms of the Civil Secessions, there was in theory a decisive endpoint to the conflicts involved, as was to be expected of the conventional struggles they represented. In the Congo the secessionist government under Moïse Tshombe was driven from its territory and the local administration dismantled. However, while the civil government involved was removed, these were not the only actors. The Katangan Gendarmerie, that mixture of locally raised forces and expatriate mercenaries, escaped to Portuguese-controlled Angola along with some of the administration, forming another secessionist front, the Front de Libération nationale Congolaise, or FLNC.12 Its armed elements continued their regional struggle by invading Katanga twice during the 1970s in struggles that became known as Shaba I and Shaba II.13 In both cases these invasions were beaten back by Mobutu Sese Seko’s government with significant international aid, including direct military intervention by the French and Belgians.14 Following these eruptions, the FLNC kept up its agitation, but with the resources of the province being strategically critical to Mobutu’s government, the drive for secession largely died away. However, with end of the Cold War there have been continual challenges from Katanga and other regions of the country seeking their own voice during the transformation of the Congo during and after the deadly Congo Wars (1996–97 and 1998–2003).

While in the Congo there was a weak state combatting at best a political rival, the aftermath of Biafra offered a very different case. The Nigerian government emerged from the civil war as the unchallenged administration of a high-capacity African state with significant international support. However, conversely, while the secessionist state of Biafra was decisively defeated, the manner of its defeat, the emotional appeal of its government during its final year of existence, and its recasting as essentially a quasi-ethnic polity created a strong ideological project that survived long after its military defeat. In the southeast of the country there has been continuing sympathy for the Biafran project and a significant mythology formed around the three years the Biafran state existed. Numerous popular groups have claimed to continue the work of the Biafran state throughout the years of military rule, with the most prominent being the Movement for the Actualization of the Sovereign State of Biafra or MASSOB.15 MASSOB has continued agitation for the secession of the Biafran homeland and has remained a significant thorn in the side of the government of Nigeria, leading to several high-profile clashes and crackdowns, even as the country passed from military rule back to electoral democracy. While these clashes have not broken out into a formal military conflict, the idea of Biafra and its political goals remain an animating force in parts of the country.16 There have also been newer groups that have been more active in recent years, such as the Indigenous People of Biafra, or IPOB. IPOB has largely undertaken a peaceful approach, offering demonstrations and remembrances while demanding a referendum to answer once and for all the status of a separate Biafra. However, despite their peaceful methods, IPOB has been targeted by the Nigerian government, with several injuries or deaths caused by the Nigerian military during their crackdowns.

While the Civil Secessions studied here have experienced definitive failures of their political projects to manifest as independent states, the case studies offered for the Long Wars actually succeeded in their goals. While this makes them often an exception, as smaller conflicts started during this period (and in some cases still ongoing) have not reached their goals of independence, both of these case studies can point toward the complexity of the political goal of secession even following the successful prosecution of a secessionist conflict. As noted, both Eritrea and South Sudan emerged victorious in their conflicts. However, simple victory and even the international recognition of their independence did not necessarily answer the immediate questions of transition to civil governance that these victories allowed. In fact, although this volume has argued that the emergence of essentially a system of civil and social governance within these conflicts was a precondition to their victory, in turn the forms and capacity of this governance would lead these two case studies down very different paths following their military successes.

The story of Eritrea’s successful secession was essentially one of a disparate population eventually organizing itself into a disciplined society that could sustain and prosecute its long conflict against Ethiopia. Although this took decades, the consolidation of power under the EPLF, the building of a militarized and politically conscious society, and the incorporation of numerous interest groups allowed the EPLF to continue its conflict even during the massive influx of military capacity from the Soviet bloc to the Ethiopian Derg. This same centralized and disciplined organization took the lead in the plebiscite that would help grant Eritrea its independence and then took on the role of the interim government of the new state. During this time the EPLF under Isaias Afwerki promulgated the idea of general elections and a new constitution by 1997, allowing representative government to be established within the new polity. However, this was never carried out. The EPLF renamed itself the People’s Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ) and established itself as the sole allowed party within the new country, filling the National Assembly with its own members and installing Afwerki as the first, and to this date only, president of Eritrea.

Since then Eritrea has become an increasingly authoritarian state, with the PFDJ exercising extremely oppressive single-party rule. Dissent from this new order has largely been met with brute force and, increasingly, political imprisonment, with Eritrea’s human rights record being one of the worst in the world. This oppression of its citizens has been paired with a mandatory national service component for all Eritreans between eighteen and forty, alienating the rising generation of youth who were born or came of age after the liberation struggle.17 Beyond its domestic authoritarianism, Eritrea’s foreign policy has seen it become increasingly isolated. Regionally Afwerki’s regime has had both major and minor conflicts, including a conventional war with Ethiopia in the late 1990s18 and a scuffle with Yemen over Red Sea islands. In the broader international context, the increasingly strident human rights violations of his regime have largely made Eritrea a pariah to all but the most desperate international partners, with Eritrea having been given the moniker of the “North Korea of Africa.”19

Given these results, it is rather obvious to note that simply winning a secessionist conflict is not a guarantee of effective or representative governance, even for that group which has led the secession. While those members of the EPLF (and later PFDJ) have largely emerged from that conflict with representation and state authority, this is certainly not anything close to a universal experience. Instead, the larger part of the population has found itself within a system of governance that appears somewhat at odds with what had been promised initially: self-determination, representation, larger social caucuses, and the ability to mould a new Eritrea for themselves and their children. Instead, the expansive and disciplined organization, which had proven its strength and resilience in its long war, followed the path of many revolutionary fronts to dictatorship and authoritarianism.

However, in contrast to the EPLF, which emerged as an extremely centralized and robust secessionist front, the South Sudanese case featured a loose organization of numerous fragmented fronts that had only been welded together in the final few years of the conflict. Even then, while John Garang had managed to bring the majority of the fronts under his unified SPLM-Mainstream, his group never necessarily had control of all of the armed groups struggling against the North. Instead, it was far more common for numerous small splinter groups to continue their own struggles or for groups like the Southern Sudan Independence Movement, which themselves splintered even as they made an accommodation with the North. Garang’s group had managed to at least create a basic social and political infrastructure beyond that of its rivals, and it was this infrastructure that enabled him and his followers to survive the challenging period following the collapse of the Mengistu government, which had been supplying much of his arms.

However, whereas the Eritrean infrastructure created a firm and powerful force for unification, even if it descended into authoritarianism, the South Sudanese political base would be one that had trouble enforcing its authority over its various constituent parts. This became even more evident during the period between the official cessation of hostilities in 2005 and the plebiscite that would give the South its independence. Shortly after the signing of the ceasefire, Garang was killed in a helicopter crash in July 2005.20 He was succeeded by Salva Kiir as president, with Riek Machar retaining the vice presidency. Initially beginning their careers on very different sides of the very fractured military landscape of the SPLA, the two would often have trouble seeing eye to eye, and to many they embodied the precarious relationship between the various factions of still-armed fighters, including an ethnic split between the Dinka and the Nuer peoples of South Sudan.21 Already dealing with the challenge of building a government, the Kiir regime then faced a series of crises as it inched toward independence. In 2010 it fought against an armed rebellion by the South Sudan Democratic Movement, which attracted a series of dissident officers and fighters who felt estranged from the new government.22 This was followed in 2011 by another group, the South Sudan Liberation Movement, and a series of continuous raids between various pastoralist groups.23 In all cases the government did its best to suppress or pay off these dissidents, but they represented increasingly alienated constituencies that could only be ignored at the peril of the emerging state.

At the same time, hostilities re-erupted with the North over territory in the Southern Kordofan and Blue Nile provinces, leading to serious bloodshed. While the struggle initially arose primarily because the populations of the two provinces were not included within South Sudan but the SPLA had been active within them, it took on a new cast thanks to the Abyei territory that straddled the Kordofan and Bahr el Ghazal provinces.24 This territory was particularly oil-rich and was desired by both the North and the South, leading to support to local affiliated groups and eventual direct intervention by both the Sudanese military and SPLM. While eventually the Abyei dispute was quashed with the aid of United Nations peacekeepers, the struggle between SPLM-allied forces in the Blue Nile and Kordofan regions and the North has continued for years. While the South has avoided official involvement in these continuing conflicts, they illustrated the continued challenges and centrifugal forces facing the new and ill-defined nation regarding citizenship, participation, and borders, especially following the end of the long war against the North.

Even entering independence in 2011, South Sudan had extremely limited capacity to maintain a unified governance. The various factions within the SPLM/A remained at odds, numerous smaller armed conflicts were erupting within and without the new country, and the main figures within the government represented far more their individual ethnicized factions than the unified government. Despite the best-intentioned efforts by the international community, led by the United States, Africa’s newest country was at best a fractious sovereign territory heading into 2013. In the wake of a rumoured coup attempt, President Kiir began to swiftly reorganize his government, dismissing numerous members of the police, military, and government while trying to position his own loyalists in place. At the same time, he accused his rivals of fomenting the ethnic and political divisions that had characterized so much of the secessionist struggle, heightening tensions within the country. Finally, in July 2013, Kiir dismissed Machar and the rest of his cabinet, dismantled much of the political structure of the SPLM, and indicated his continuing resolution to lead the country.25

These actions, occurring as they did within the context of ethnic and political tensions, precipitated a crisis. Following what was characterized as a mutiny in Juba in December 2013, fighting broke out throughout the country. By early 2014 a civil war was in full swing, with rebels led by Riek Machar fighting Bor and Kiir’s forces, which were being aided by Ugandan troops that had been deployed in support of his regime.26 Despite a series of ceasefires and mediation by the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) and other parties, the violence continued off and on into 2016, with increasing indications of ethnic cleansing, sexual violence, and the use of child soldiers. By the beginning of 2017 there was continuing political manoeuvring between various ethnic factions and there still was no end in sight despite a threatened redeployment of an aggressive United Nations presence. Finally, in December 2017, the government signed another ceasefire with the rebels after capturing much of their territory through the previous year, and the conflict has momentarily ceased. However, the state itself remains fractured and damaged from the four years of war and the cleavages within its population remain largely unresolved, with the government largely remaining in power through external intervention and support.

While the Civil Secessions ended as formal conflicts but carried on as political causes and the Long Wars saw success in secession but failures in achieving sustainable governance, the newer wave has offered a series of other fascinating lessons. The historical contexts of the Cold War–era conflicts offered a distinct path of rebels versus the state attempting to demand their own sovereignty, which lent itself to the binary of success or failure in their secessionist goals. However, as seen in the earlier attempts, failure in the secessionist conflict did not necessarily end the desire for secession, even though the Cold War support given to sovereign states often precluded further attempts. Interestingly, it was also the end of that support that aided the success of the Long Wars, but in turn the changing nature of the African state meant that the emergent nations would deal with the challenges all other African states were dealing with. Thus, Eritrea found itself isolated while South Sudan found itself born without the capacity to sustain itself. However, this same context would offer an entirely new complexity to the New Wave secessions during and indeed after their conflicts.

For Somaliland the intervening years have not yielded much change from where the case study ended. While the post–Cold War moment has largely seen a weakening and in some cases collapse of state capacity in Africa, Somaliland has managed to not only maintain theirs but grow into its own de facto state during its now over twenty-five years of existence. However, as noted this is only really half the story. Somalia, its notional parent state, has remained a broken polity, and it is this exact collapse of capacity that has allowed Somaliland to flourish as opposed to being forced into an interminable conflict to retain its self-determination. Even long past its collapse in 1991 Somalia has not managed to rebuild itself, having faced a series of internal conflicts with clan-based warlords, the Islamic Courts Union,27 and now the insurgent group al-Shabaab. Specifically, these latter two have significantly changed the context within which Somalia and thus Somaliland must be understood. The Islamist character of these two movements have compelled both regional and international powers to intervene. With the Islamic Courts Union’s rise in 2006, Ethiopia intervened directly in Somalia to overthrow the waxing Islamist group.28 Following the overthrow of the ICU, a new Islamist threat built around jihadis returning from Afghanistan arose in 2009 calling itself al-Shabaab. Proving itself even more formidable in its struggle against the federal government than even the ICU had been, al-Shabaab triggered an international response, with interventions by Kenya, the African Union, and the United States all occurring to blunt the power of the rising Islamist threat.29 Following a series of aggressive campaigns during 2011–2014, the Federal Republic of Somalia and its allies managed to crush much of the conventional strength of al-Shabaab, but this simply led the group to adopt more irregular tactics, launching a series of guerrilla and terror strikes both in Somalia and abroad. While al-Shabaab has continued to be a deadly terror group, this has conversely continued the military pressure exerted by the United States as part of its Global War on Terror.

During this period of time and to the present, the federal government of Somalia has slowly built its capacity, but due to the interminable military struggles it has had to undertake as well as the challenges of rebuilding effective governance, it has only been able to promulgate a constitution and build the constituent parts of government within the past five years. However, this has meant that while the South of the country has finally been finding its way and Puntland has slowly been entering negotiations to be part of the new federal government, the de facto state of Somaliland has used its stability to fully flesh out as much of a de jure existence as it can. The informal state has used its position free from the turbulence of Islamists to reach out to its other neighbours and establish, if not formal recognition, at least lasting relationships that have helped continue the economic development of Somaliland.30 Specifically, its port of Berbera has proven to be an excellent transit port for both landlocked states in the Horn and for trading partners in the Arabian Peninsula, offering Somaliland the status of an increasingly bustling entrepot.

However, beginning in the second decade of the twenty-first century there has been a resurgent challenge that might change the trajectory of Somaliland. The federal government has finally begun gaining enough capacity to press forward its claim as the central government of the entirety of the old state. In a large part this capacity has been aided by its African and increasingly international partners, in particular Turkey. This increasing international aid has been viewed as part of a complex series of alliances tying countries of the Horn into a larger struggle amongst the Gulf Nations, such as the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar.31 However, whereas Somalia has found itself aligned with Turkey and Qatar, Somaliland has recently signed an agreement involving access and construction in Berbera with Ethiopia and a United Arab Emirates–owned company.32 This has caused a strain within the equilibrium of the region, as Somalia has formally rejected any authority Somaliland has to enter into such an agreement even as Somalia’s patron Turkey has increasingly been placing pressure against the UAE. While Somalia has had little chance to challenge Somaliland since 1991, with its increasing capacity and the support of its newfound allies, a challenge to the actual state apparatus that has been built in Somaliland might not be long in coming.

Finally, in Azawad, the autonomy that was granted following the conflict between Mali and the Kel Tamasheq in the mid-1990s never quite managed to live up the expectations of the Kel Tamasheq, with the local autonomy still not allowing the Kel Tamasheq full access to the resources of the state that they had desired nor integration into the political and military structures of the state. This process was paralleled in Niger, where resources that had been promised to the Nigerien rebels never fully materialized and the integration of fighters into the armed forces under French auspices did not occur in large numbers as desired. From the end of the armed confrontations in 1995 until 2007 there was at best an uneasy peace as the Kel Tamasheq of both countries felt the peace deal they had signed was not being lived up to. This eventually led to a re-eruption of hostilities in 2007 in both countries, as armed groups of nomadic fighters launched attacks against government installations.33

The fighting was largely in the Kidal region in Mali and the Agadez region in Niger, with a series of piecemeal offensives by the rebels throwing the government troops in both regions into chaos. This was seen as extremely alarming by international observers, as the Agadez region of Niger held large uranium deposits that, absent formal state control, could very quickly provide fissile material to non-state actors. However, in both countries the response was relatively swift. In Mali the army quickly sent troops to garrison northern towns and launched a diplomatic offensive in the hopes of defusing the new rebellion before it spiralled further out of control. This offensive proved to be effective, as non-rebelling Kel Tamasheq communities put pressure on those fighting to end their conflict, resulting in a new ceasefire toward the end of the year. While several smaller splinter groups of rebels continued the fight and launched several audacious raids deep into Mali, by 2009 these groups had largely been marginalized and driven into Libya, where they found safe haven with Muammar Gaddafi’s government. In Niger the conflict raged on for a longer period, with neither the Nigerian forces nor the Kel Tamasheq able to land a decisive blow against the other. By 2009, with the Malian conflict largely over and attempts at broadening their conflict having failed, the Kel Tamasheq forces in Niger split, with some hardliners fleeing to Libya to join their Malian brethren, while the bulk negotiated a settlement along the lines of that reached in Mali. In both cases, the agreements called for amnesty for the rebels, closer integration of the Kel Tamasheq into the government, and the disarmament of the former rebels.

There was also a sideshow of these conflicts that would prove to be a harbinger of later issues. During the conflict, six hostages were taken by a group that would become known as al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, or AQIM, which had formed in the aftermath of the Algerian Civil War. This group, professing radical Islamist beliefs, was initially confused by onlookers as being part of the larger Kel Tamasheq rebel movements and was seen as heralding a new wrinkle in these struggles. Despite this confusion, AQIM was never formally part of any of the existing Kel Tamasheq nationalist groups but was instead an increasingly capable armed group that professed its own form of radical Islam as a solution to the issues of the Maghreb and claimed connections to the larger international web of Islamist fighters known as al-Qaeda.34 Ever since the September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center in the United States, there had been a growing concern amongst international actors that radical Islamist groups would form the vanguard of a new era of instability in the developing world. While the Kel Tamasheq groups were not formally affiliated with AQIM, their involvement in the larger struggle was taken by many to be a warning sign of a possible new vector for Kel Tamasheq grievance.

These fears seemed to be validated with a new eruption of violence in 2012 in northern Mali. The toppling of Muammar Gaddafi’s government in 2011–2012 had left those remaining Kel Tamasheq hardliners in Libya without safe haven, leading them to return to northern Mali. However, they had not spent the intervening years idle. Many had served as mercenaries in the service of Gaddafi, gaining new arms and training as well as forging connections with several Islamist groups within the region. With their return to Mali, fighting began anew, but the returning Kel Tamasheq and their allies proved to be too well armed and trained for the Malian army, decisively sweeping them out of the North and seizing Timbuktu and Gao in the opening months of 2012.35 In turn, the Malian armed forces launched a short-lived coup, crippling the response against the combined Kel Tamasheq and Islamist offensive. However, with the North now firmly in their hands, the newfound allies fell out over arguments of how the North was to be governed. The Kel Tamasheq nationalists, represented largely the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA), wished to see the North finally become the Azawad state they had desired.36 However, their Islamist allies of the Ansar Dine and the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa (MOJWA) instead wished to carry on a larger struggle to create a local Sharia-compliant state in the Maghreb. This disagreement eventually led to violent clashes within Gao in late June, leading the MNLA elements to withdraw from the city and its surrounding environs.37

The initial partnership had raised concerns that the new drive for ethno-nationalist secession or separatism might find potent new partners in the transnational Islamist fronts that were proliferating in the first decade of the new century. However, the falling out of the MNLA and MOJWA seemed to reinforce the central tension between the ethno-nationalists and the Islamists, where one defined itself via its national identity whereas the other demanded a larger transnational subservience to an ideological form of Islam. This fissure was reinforced as the MNLA actually launched several independent attacks on MOJWA and Ansar Dine positions, including an unsuccessful attempt to regain Gao. The fissure also led to a realignment, as the MNLA forces opened talks with the Malian government, renouncing their claim on an independent Azawad. While this nation-state had initially seemed so close at hand, the nationalists were now caught between strong and aggressive former allies and a national government that was shortly to be receiving massive international aid to put down an Islamist threat. The MNLA thus made the calculations that it would be best to abandon their hopes for Azawad again and instead drive for Kel Tamasheq home rule, an agreement the Malian government endorsed shortly before French and African Union forces arrived to bolster their struggle against the Islamists in early 2013. The French launching of Operation Serval and its supporting AU missions quickly smashed most of the Islamist forces in the North and allowed for the Malian and allied contingents to reassert their control over their territory as quickly as it had been lost the previous year.38

This struggle has continued to the present day. While the increasingly fragmented Islamists in the Sahel have kept up their struggle, launching isolated attacks against the government forces of Mali and Niger (as well as the remaining French and United Nations forces), the Kel Tamasheq have largely avoided being swept up into these struggles. While isolated members of their community have found their way into the Islamist camp, the communities have largely continued their struggle for self-rule and separatism within their states. While this has not always been achieved to the degree these communities would have hoped, there has not been another general rebellion by the Kel Tamasheq. and the much-feared alliance between the nationalists and the Islamists has never re-emerged. Essentially, while the ethno-nationalist and irredentist desires of the MNLA and other Kel Tamasheq have not disappeared, they have largely settled for as much autonomy as they can achieve at the moment while trying to avoid being swept into the larger and deadlier conflicts that continue to rage in the region.

A New Dynamic to Secession

Since the success of South Sudan’s plebiscite and secession with the unified support of the international community, we have seen a paucity of new secessionist attempts, much less successes. This has largely been due to yet another shift in the international context since the end of the Cold War. This shift is actually revealed within the failure of the 2012 declaration of Azawad by the MNLA and their eventual re-alignment with the Malian state and their French allies. This failure of an almost-achieved de facto secession serves as a central example of the current new dynamics within secession in Africa for the near term. The immediate post–Cold War moment had reopened the question of secession for a number of reasons. The lack of international intervention or consensus had removed much of the threat of either hegemonic or regional-organization interference in secessionist struggles. In addition, there was the question of the legitimacy of the existent state and state governments amongst the international community, opening the intellectual, ideological, and even diplomatic space for possible alternative states on the continent. Simply put, in the absence of the Cold War dynamics forcing competing camps to support the existing balance of states in Africa, there was suddenly a fluidity to sovereignty that hadn’t existed before.

However, this changed again in 2001 with the sudden eruption of the Global War on Terror as led by the hegemonic United States and supported by its developing world allies. Suddenly African state governments found a new avenue for international support: to cast themselves as the bulwark against the new wave of Islamist groups that were emerging across the continent.39 This summoned the same diplomatic, developmental, and defence support that previously choosing a side in the Cold War would have, once again infusing weaker states with the capacity and international support necessary to stabilize their own monopoly on the legitimate use of violence and again largely suppressing the secessionist or separatist movements within their country. This eventually crystallized in many cases into partnerships across regions to suppress the Islamist threat and any other groups that could be construed as furthering those threats. Agreements such as the Trans-Saharan Counter Terror Partnership (TSCTP) pumped money and training into regional military partnerships that then allowed them to more effectively fight back against any illicit groups seen as threats to the sovereign state.40

In addition, while the Organization of African Unity had transitioned into the African Union in 2001 and reformed its initial ironclad focus on state sovereignty, particularly in issues of peacekeeping and stability, new dynamics were afoot. Often frustrated with the seeming inability of the OAU to deal with the problems they were facing, the states of the continent largely began forming more effective regional partnerships with the support of the international community. These regional partnerships existed to help stabilize the regional order of their constituent states and as such offered increased capacity to any individual member. Regional organizations such as the Southern African Development Community (SADC) or the Economic Organization of West African States (ECOWAS) offered forums where internal issues could be negotiated but in times of deep instability could also offer entire peacekeeping contingents to help restabilize a region and suppress any internal revolt.41

With the new post-9/11 dynamics recasting the African state as the ultimate bulwark against the Islamist threat and the consequent reimposition of hegemonic support for those existent states, the fluidity that had seemed to emerge for the concept of sovereignty disappeared again.42 While the plebiscite for the secession of South Sudan continued apace with the blessing of the United States, almost all other ambitions for secessionists were dashed, with separatism as the at-best consolation prize for their efforts. Even to the present day, many of those populations with separatist ambitions, whether in the Casamance region of Senegal or in the anglophone region of Cameroon, have found their hopes crushed as their host countries have instead become staunch partners in the expansive and ill-defined Global War on Terror. Africa has thus largely re-entered a period where the official boundaries of states have again become immobile and even separatism remains a rare and often ill-defined quality due to the resurgence of state capacity and the growing regional consensuses on the continent.

Coda

Since the drawing of boundaries on the continent and the devolution of political power to the newborn states, there has been the concept of secession in Africa. The very first attempt happened a mere three days after the independence of the Congo on 30 June 1960, an attempt that would prove to be almost archetypal in its reasons if not its execution. Populations within the continent, defined either through common understandings of political power or through ethnic communities, have desired to exercise their own political and ultimately economic and social autonomy with respect to the nation whose borders were drawn around them. Absent any peaceful way to attempt this separation from their host state, these communities have turned to violent means to secure their separation or autonomy.

Of course, these violent means have in turn been shaped by their political, social, and economic contexts, just as are all forms of warfare. While initial attempts at secession tried to simply declare their separation and fight the conventional wars that might grant them recognition, this was quickly seen to be a pipe dream. Future attempts were more realistic, fighting protracted conflicts intended to maximize the advantages of the secessionists or separatists, who often knew the ground and communities where the struggle would be fought. For a lucky few, these protracted conflicts continued burning until the shock wave of the end of the Cold War undermined so many states on the African continent and allowed these combatants a brief window to achieve their goals of an independent state for their community.

However, for many more secessionists and separatists, the protracted war continues even as their long-time opponents and hosts regain their strength and the concept of secession recedes even further under the surface of a resurgent Africa. While these groups might be able to call upon aid from other dissidents against the new US-centric world order, this has not been enough to truly force the separation that the collapse of Ethiopia or Somalia had or even to draw on a hegemon’s aid as South Sudan did. Instead, for the moment these groups can at best survive and hope for a local settlement even as they face new regional orders that deny them their desired autonomy, and the concept of secession seems as remote as it might ever have in the 1980s.

Of course, this all again depends on the current world dynamics, which are underpinned by a state-centric policy supported by a hegemonic United States pursuing a war on terror. While at the moment this might be seen as extending into the foreseeable future, one might have reasonably said that the Cold War would continue indefinitely from their perch in 1984. However, much as the Cold War ended slowly and then quickly, there is no telling how much longer the Western Consensus will last or even if the Global War on Terror will remain the central initiative it has been. Even now revisionist powers such as China and Russia are currently challenging the US-led Western consensus and the political and military establishment of the United States is increasingly looking toward near-peer adversaries and less at Islamist insurgencies. This isn’t to say that the current political dynamics that support legacy African states will disappear overnight, but simply that no world order lasts forever and that even now the current global moment might be changing. While secession and even separatism on the African continent might seem remote now, those groups still waging a protracted conflict might find their own opportunity at some future date and establish their own formal sovereignty under the auspices of the nations of Africa.