now let's talk about how the legacy of
colonialism has led to more conflict in
Africa and has lowered living standards
sub-saharan Africa has had an
above-average frequency of conflict
since those countries achieved
independence that's been one reason why
a lot of them have failed to develop
more economically wars obviously lower
the incentives to invest they destroy
wealth and they make it harder for
countries to implement value enhancing
reforms but where do those wars come
from let's consider it one important
factor this is what African boundaries
looked like just before colonization if
you're wondering European colonization
of Africa most of it started in the
1880s and that process was largely
complete by the early 20th century
anyway before colonialism what you see
are a lot of very small units these are
not necessarily formal nations in the
modern sense of that term but they were
agreements or conventions or boundaries
which in some way were respected and
they correspond to different ethnic
groups okay so now colonialism comes
along and it imposes national boundaries
on Africa of course at first these
national boundaries are within the
colonial structure but they remain in
place after World War Two when the
colonial powers start to leave Africa
you can see pretty clearly from this map
that the borders imposed by the colonial
powers very often have only tangential
relationships to the distribution of
economic groups there are many nations
in Africa in fact most nations which
contain a large number of different
ethnic groups many ethnic groups
straddle two or more nations and in
general when the national boundaries
were set up by the colonial powers they
didn't really care about matching those
boundaries or two ethnic groups because
they thought Africa was simply theirs to
rule often for economic motives and in
many cases they didn't even know about
all the different ethnic groups and
where their boundaries might start or
finish so it was a mix of avarice and
bad incentives and mere ignorant but in
any case the boundaries got drawn in
fairly arbitrary way
again really not very closely matched up
with the distribution of different
ethnic groups if you'd like some
examples of ethnic groups which are
distributed across two or more national
boundaries in current Africa well here's
a few of them and of course you can
google these for more information it
turns out that having the boundaries
drawn in these ways is very bad for
peace
so one empirical result is that civil
conflict tends to be concentrated in
historical homelands of partitioned
ethnicities perhaps most importantly
civil conflict intensity is 50 percent
higher where a partitioned ethnicities
reside that means if you have a region
where ethnicities are split across
multiple national borders the fighting
when there is fighting tends to be worse
in those same regions on average
violence against civilians is 40% higher
and the chance of there being some kind
of control change in government such as
a coup d'etat well that is five to ten
percent higher and of course we're
talking about changes which occur
through fighting and not through
elections all of those results are based
on a data set which is reporting over
43,000 conflict events from the years
1997 to 2010 if you'd like to see
African conflict zones in the form of a
map you can study this picture here
which is color-coded if you'd like to
study where civil wars have occurred
most frequently you can study this map
here which is color-coded and again
there are in general correlations
between these conflicts and regions
where ethnic groups are partitioned
across different national borders the
implication is that there may well have
been less conflict had the borders and
the ethnicities matched up more closely
this shouldn't actually come as a major
surprise a lot of the histories of
European violent conflicts for instance
had something to do with ethnicities
which were partitioned across national
borders
Europe's world war 1 for instance had a
good deal to do with the fact that
national borders and the Geograph
distribution of different ethnic groups
were not closely matched up this was
also a one factor of many behind
Europe's World War two for instance
there were sizable German populations in
countries other than Germany and Germany
tried to in some way take over or
incorporate these Germanic populations
but of course the countries that
contained these Germanic populations did
not always welcome the invasions or the
incorporations
in any case this was one of the reasons
why European history has so much
conflict in its best in any case all of
these results are taken from a very good
paper on the history of Africa called
the long-run effects of the Scramble for
Africa this is available online and for
free