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ISSN: 2574 -1241
ISSN: 2574 -1241
Received: August 21, 2023; Published: August 30, 2023
*Corresponding author: Kourouma Sory, Institut Supérieur des Arts Mory Kanté de Dubréka (ISAMK/D), Guinea
DOI: 10.26717/BJSTR.2023.52.008275
The problem of insecurity undermines the development of African countries where the phenomenon causes a situation of aggravating instability. It is therefore high time for the academic debate to appropriate it based on the principle that one of the missions of the university is also to participate in the well-being of communities. The secessionist movements in the Sudano-Sahelian strip took possession of weapons and ammunition abandoned in the Libyan desert to occupy an area of millions of km2 between North Africa and the entire Sahelian part of West Africa and then operated terrorist incursions into coastal countries, particularly in the Gulf of Guinea: Benin, Côte d’Ivoire and Togo. Added to this are the problems of population and land.
Keywords: Insecurity; Land Crisis; Education; Terrorism; Population
Abbreviations: SPLA: Sudan People’s Liberation Army; ISAG: Institute of Arts of Guinea; ISAMK/D: Institut Supérieur des Arts Mory Kanté de Dubréka
The issue of insecurity undermines the development of African countries where the phenomenon causes a situation of aggravating precariousness. It is therefore high time for the academic debate to appropriate it based on the principle that one of the missions of the university is also to participate in the well-being of communities. If yesterday our concern was simply the emancipation of the population for the development of Africa, today, the movements of populations: land crises, education, communication, inter-community relations because of insecurity is a major concern of our time. Thus, our contribution to scientific research for the fight against insecurity is topical at the level of the world, Africa and our respective nations. It is true that insecurity remains a multifaceted social phenomenon depending on the socio-economic and political environments and conditions, sometimes according to international geopolitical imperatives [1]. Indeed, research on population dynamics begins with our country since Guinea is experiencing a regime of insecurity caused by a movement of populations especially from the Foutanian plateau to the maritime coast or from the same plateau to Forest Guinea further south of the country with consequences that influence the social framework. Other aspects of life suffer the consequences of population dynamics that endanger social tranquility and peace, especially in the city of Conakry on the axis: Hamdalaye-Kagbélen, where the Ratoma area is taken each time. Finally, the Guinean case is also explained in the mining areas of Boké, Siguiri, Mandiana and Dinguiraye where populations are often expropriated of their land for the benefit of companies and which lead to violence or insecurity. As was the case in Boké where all the machines of the companies were burned and the Chinese were finally forced to comply. Apart from the insecurity linked to people, there is also climate degradation such as deforestation through mining.
To address the theme, our work is organized as follows:
1. The conceptual definitions and our understandings of them;
2. The level of academic research (partial overview) on the issue
of insecurity and population dynamics, habitat;
3. The methodological approach with which we will conduct a
Cartesian analysis that would lead to suggestions for solutions;
Thus, we will proceed by questioning, setting hypotheses and objectives to be achieved that constitute materials for the path of scientific research.
For a long time in post-colonial Africa, the phenomenon of insecurity was explained by drought and armed rebellions whose immediate consequence is the massive displacement of populations. In this case, the food, health and hygiene of the displaced are compromised, nature can also pay the price, etc. Since the movements began in Nigeria’s Niger Delta in 2009, with the Islamic sect Boko Haram, to the Arab Spring in 2011, where many authoritarian regimes were ousted by popular movements. Insecurity has increasingly changed with the Libyan imbalance following the assassination of President Muhamar Gaddafi. The secessionist movements in the Sudano-Sahelian strip took possession of weapons and ammunition abandoned in the Libyan desert to occupy an area of six million km2 between North Africa and the entire Sahelian part of West Africa and then operated terrorist incursions into coastal countries, particularly in the Gulf of Guinea: Benin, Côte d’Ivoire and Togo. Added to this are the problems of population and land. The productive countryside is being disrupted in its primary vocation by new forms of creative and residential uses [2]. The resurgence of conflicts of use in recent years is the most tangible marker of this slow transformation, which makes rural areas the subject of new demands on the one hand, by neo-rural people and, on the other hand, by tourists, who attach increasing importance to the preservation of their living environment. Faced with the rise of environmental issues, new lines of conflict are emerging with “traditional” populations, first and foremost farmers.
The recent and media case is the city of Karma (Burkina Faso) a no-treatment zone is the most glaring example. The “continuist” reading of violent conflicts with a land dimension in Africa is particularly confronted with the trivialization of their explanation by the decisive weight of a few macro-factors such as demographic pressure and the scarcity of land or natural resources. Intuitive and highlighted by the media, politicians, international institutions and numerous works of expertise and research, this neo-Malthusian explanation constitutes a true narrative of the inevitability and dramatic nature of “wars for land” in the absence of appropriate policies. The use of this argument is also tempting for governments facing discontent or rebellion. Invoking land conflicts resulting from land scarcity avoids calling into question the strictly political aspects of conflicts, the deliberately provoked nature of the chain of violence and, possibly, the State’s responsibility for the conflict in land relations. Development aid donors also frequently use the conventional narrative of land insecurity resulting from competition for land and dysfunctional land governance to promote “modern” tenure security schemes based on formalization of titles. However, the primacy given to these factors in explaining violent conflicts with a land dimension hardly masks the fact that they are neither necessary nor necessary causes. Sufficient. The proposed metanarrative of the proliferation of “wars for land” eludes the existence of a complex “causal chain” between resource scarcity, competition for land, and civil wars (Boone, 2014).
Without ignoring the undeniable impact of demographic pressure and competition for land on the configuration of the land issue in Africa, this impact does not occur according to a specific trajectory, but in a diffuse way through the institutional entanglement of systems of rules. The qualification of community conflicts is polarized on cleavages organized around socially constructed identities, which can be of a very diverse nature (ethnicity, religion, caste, lineage, between indigenous and migrants, between herders and farmers, between generations...), while the qualification of civil war is polarized on the State (its involvement, its control, its anchoring in rural areas). Communal conflicts and civil wars are therefore forms of organized violence whose interfaces must be specially explored from the “continuist” perspective defended here [3].
Conceptual Definitions and Our Understandings
A. Population dynamics: is the fluctuation over time of the
number of individuals within a given population. The regular
movement of populations in times of instability or crisis: war, natural
calamities…
B. Land Crises : Considered through the prism of land issues,
the specific conceptualization of intra- and inter-community tensions
where the land dimension is generally very present, allows
us to better understand how these antagonisms interact with civil
conflicts through the mediation of land issues. Rather than reasoning
in terms of causal relationships, it is therefore appropriate
to study complex configurations of interdependencies between
land and war (Bavinck et al. 2014; Van Leeuwen & Van Den Haar,
2016). In other words, the social and political entrenchment of
land violence in agrarian and social structures and in broader
forms of violent mobilization. The fundamental element of the
connection between local land conflicts and larger-scale violent
conflicts lies not only in the place of land as an essential need, but
in the question of when, where and how actors and social groups
are able to act collectively and violently by claiming this claim.
and connect to other agendas that go beyond the issue of access
to and control of land.
C. Education : Education goes beyond schooling. It encompasses
all efforts to impart knowledge and skills, to shape and inculcate
attitudes, values and behaviours, and to teach skills, techniques
and methods, whether in school or in non-formal settings.
D. Communication : The word communication comes from the
Latin communication: pooling, exchange of words, action of announcement
(Le Robert). Communication allows people to establish
psychological and social links with each other, it is part of an
ongoing process of building social relationships. To communicate
is to exchange meaning, of the link. Generally speaking, communication
occurs whenever any organism, and a living organism in
particular, affects another organism by modifying it or modifying
its action from the transmission of information (and not by a direct action, such as that exerted by a physical force involving energy).
E. Inter-Community Relationship : Is essential to life in society.
It is an integral part of our daily lives, whether through a greeting,
a smile or a negotiation... Communication is a guarantee of a
healthy relationship. It affects every time you interact with others.
Communicating is therefore not as simple as it seems. If everyone
knows more or less how to interact with others, doing it effectively
is an art. So, if you’re struggling to get your messages across, it’s
time to learn how to communicate with others.
The Level of Academic Research (Partial Overview) on the Issue of Insecurity and Population Dynamics, Habitat
This non-exhaustive list of factors of variation in the land indexation of internal conflicts highlights the inextricable links that exist between: the dynamics of social relations about land resources, in their productive, political, identity and symbolic dimensions; political violence; the dynamics of formation and construction of the State and its anchoring at the level of local rural communities. Population mobility and community heterogeneity. This “nexus of land, violence, state, communities, mobility” circumscribes a field of interfaces between the field of violent conflicts and crises, on the one hand, and that of land dynamics, on the other, whose objects overlap, but whose specialization often limits mutual enrichment. It is this field of multiple tensions that the contributors to this volume have explored. Deconstructing the uniform framework of “terrorism”. Our authors show that these groups establish a local anchorage through their ability to regulate land conflicts, to settle very old rivalries for the territory and to provide resources (weapons, fighting know-how) to rival groups. In doing so, they transform these conflicts, which become politicized and change scale. But they also transform themselves to the extent that the place they acquire in these conflicts shapes their militant base and tactical orientation. Also, in central Mali and northern Burkina Faso, offers another light on this same conflict, by addressing the forms of articulation of land disputes between herders and farmers with the internal cleavages of Fulani societies, which oppose the enslaved groups and rimaïɓe castes to the traditional rimɓe aristocracy., allied to state powers [4].
Regarding the administration of agropastoral resources, these protests resonate. On the one hand, with the ancient erosion of forms of authority caused by the impoverishment of the great rhyme families under the effect of droughts, and the shift of the centers of gravity of livestock activity towards dominated lineages; and, on the other hand, over the short period [5], with the collapse of the Malian (2012) and Burkinabe (2014) regimes, which left a security vacuum conducive to the formation of self-defense militias, who have become autonomous from traditional local power structures. These transformations were used by local political entrepreneurs to forge a discourse calling for the formation of an egalitarian society, directed against aristocratic families and state officials, which was ideologically articulated with radical jihadist movements. This “Fulani rebellion”, once freed from the rimɓe aristocracy, undertook to question the arrangements woven with the sedentary Dogon and Bambara groups in access to agropastoral resources and, more generally, with the “black power” embodied by the Malian state’s support for these sedentary groups. It now leads to the installation of a form of “government by violence” (Grajales, 2016) articulated with a variety of trafficking, but of which the control of agropastoral resources is a central issue. A review of agropastoral conflicts in the Mundri region of South Sudan presents a similar situation.
In South Sudan, the war of independence has disrupted forms of local regulation, introducing new relationships between village authorities and groups affiliated with the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA). Indeed, the strong link between the movement’s commanders and populations belonging to the Dinka group, displaced during the war, leads to a very strong ethnicization of conflicts, politicizing and polarizing identities around the distinction between Dinka and other groups. The client relationship between professionals of violence and displaced persons prevents the SPLA from positioning itself as an arbiter of local conflicts, since it is itself a stakeholder in them. While the social anchoring of armed groups is often dependent on their ability to provide this regulation, the SPLA’s alliances weaken its social base and reduce its domination to a form of coercion. It then becomes particularly vulnerable to local protests, since the expulsion of Dinka migrants by indigenous militias appears at the same time as a revolt against the new post-independence political order. The land rivalries produced by the dynamics of the independence phase of the civil war thus continued into its subsequent phases. Several of these contributions made by the researchers address in various ways the links between land conflicts and inter-community relations, their opportunities for politicization and radicalization, and the dynamics of normative pluralism that characterize most African societies.
The government of the land is, in Africa perhaps more than elsewhere, produced in composite entrenchments of organs of power, all claiming registers of legitimacy which, if they are not necessarily competing, do not overlap. It is this issue of normative pluralism, and its relationship to situations of multifaceted violence, that researchers and journalists explore. In socio-historical contexts deeply marked by the importance of elder/younger oppositions in local social and political trajectories. From the ethnographic exploration of a singular quarrel, whose outcome was violent, local political spaces are put under tension, which provides a singular light to the study of violent land conflicts that have characterized the last two decades in Côte d’Ivoire. The triangle Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana and Burkina Faso about its forms of interweaving with the question of access to land and its politicization. With reference to the political economy of the cocoa sector, preponderant in the Ivorian agrarian landscape, it mobilizes, in counterpoint, the example of neighboring Ghana, whose similar dependence on cocoa farming and the challenges of its expansion and maintenance has not given rise to processes of socio-ethnic polarization or to the connection of local land conflicts and armed confrontations, as was the case during the civil war in Côte d’Ivoire. This divergence is in light of the temporal and demographic characteristics of the cocoa farming cycles (aging of trees and planters, shifting focus of crops) to which the two plantation economies are subject, and their interaction with the political structures of each country. In Côte d’Ivoire, a coercive policy of land development in the forested west favorable to migrants facilitated the “cocoa cycle” and participated in the extension of the political base of the regime of Félix Houphouët-Boigny. But it has also been at the origin of ethno-political cleavages and tensions that have increased with the impact of the cocoa cycle on the recomposition of power relations between different producer groups and, by repercussions, between different political parties.
In Ghana, the recognition of chiefdoms and their control over access to land has combined with the concern of successive regimes to limit ethnic inequalities in access to resources, reducing the possibilities of emergence of political forces closely articulated on the social recompositions induced by the unfolding of the cocoa cycle. The contrasting trajectories of the plantation economy of these two countries, however, can only be understood by taking into account a third protagonist: Burkina Faso, a major provider of migrants. Finally, land violence can thus manifest itself in the context of civil conflicts in very diverse forms and intervene on land governance structures in different ways: through land grabbing, population displacement, direct intrusion of actors into local land governance jurisdictions and authorities, or by imposing their own territorialization projects or “governable spaces”.. Rebel or militia groups often impose their role in the regulation of land conflicts and the governance of natural resources, in order to establish a “war economy” for their benefit, but also political control of populations and administrative mechanisms. As can be seen in all these contributions, the processes of inclusion of land issues in the dynamics of political violence do not respond to intangible models, which would make armed violence with a strong land dimension a specific “type”. There is no example where the land factor is the ultimate and even less unique cause of civil wars, at the end of an inexorable rise in scale and power of conflicts on land.
As overwhelming as the global phenomenon of land scarcity and concentration of land use may appear, this introduction and the contributions that follow show that it is necessary to return to the understanding of rural governmentality and its overall dynamics in order to reproduce its real impacts. It is therefore an approach, certainly less totalizing, but at the same time more empirically demanding and more heuristic that we are calling for.
The Methodological Approach with which we Will Conduct a Cartesian Analysis that Would Lead to Suggestions for Solutions
For this theme, we have chosen a mixed method: the qualitative and quantitative method. Tools such as documentary research helped us to review the literature and establish bibliography, vocabulary mastery and expressions related to the subject. The literary review also allows us to better understand the subject.
Added to this are the direct observation, internet and audiovisual sources, archives and the experience we have of the functioning of communities in Guinea. The processing of the data collected by a content analysis will also allow us to verify the analyses.
It is interesting to make recommendations, beyond internal or external interventions or mediations (ECOWAS, UN ...) other means of communication in terms of mediation is it not time to relive? for example cultural mediation through the intervention of Elders and Griots in conflict resolution. As was the case in Guinea between Mali and Upper Volta (Burkina Faso) in 1975 in Conakry. Where the griot Sory Kandia KOUYATÉ by the strategy of President Ahmed Sékou TOURÉ then reconciled these two countries in border conflict, the Presidents: Moussa TRAORÉ and Gl. A. Sangoulé LAMIZANA. Also, in 2015 the students of the 8th Promotion of the Department of Cinema and Audiovisual of the Higher Institute of Arts of Guinea (ISAG) [6]. Today Institut Supérieur des Arts Mory Kanté de Dubréka (ISAMK/D) have developed research works of dissertations on “Peace and National Unity” supported by film productions in this electoral period for a united Guinea reconciled with itself. Finally, invite the authorities to raise awareness around the hot topics of these types through the religious.
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