For the last 60 years the positivist accounts of science and an asserted normative separation of ‘facts’ from ‘values’ have been dominant assumptions in international relations (IR) and international political economy (IPE). In contrast to such assumptions, Zubairu Wai's Epistemologies of African conflicts unmasks the epistemic violence inherent in the positivist power/knowledge regimes and, in particular, those concerning Africa, i.e., the pejoratively labelled discipline of Africanism. Wai employs what V.Y. Mudimbe has termed a ‘transdisciplinary’ perspective (xiii) that unites post-positivist IR and IPE approaches with critical studies in the fields of history, anthropology and philosophy, as well as political science. Inspired by Mudimbe's (1988) analysis of the ways in which Africa has been ‘invented’ as an object of ‘truth’ through the Western order of knowledge, Wai spends five chapters deconstructing the Africanist discourses on the civil war in Sierra Leone. His project stems from his frustration with ‘a fundamental disconnect’ between his lived experience of the conflict and influential accounts purporting to explain it (2).
Reviewing a wide-ranging literature of the ‘colonial library’, the first chapter demonstrates how evolutionist thinking has persistently characterised dominant discourses concerning African societies. Influenced by Euro- and ethno-centric conceptions of the racial and moral superiority of the West, along with Enlightenment ideals of modernity and Christian principles of salvation, as Wai discloses, the evolutionist epistemology of Africanism has served to justify the imperialism and colonialism of Europe, and to produce and sustain the mythical representation of Africa as inhabited by backward, savage and tribal people – ‘as a continent without history’ at the bottom of ‘a temporal hierarchy of progress and civilization’ (46, 48). The second chapter further unpacks the ‘epistemological configuration and order of knowledge’ (63) in the European imagination about Africa, specifically focusing on the idea of Sierra Leone. It shows how the Sierra Leonean state was historically constituted through the visible and invisible forms of violence that accompanied European imperial expansion and through an evolutionist project promoted under the British colonial experiment and its formalised domination.
From there Wai turns to the dominant discourses on the decade-long civil war in Sierra Leone which began in the 1990s and, more broadly, contemporary conflicts in the African continent. In the third chapter, while expressing the danger of attempting to produce the definitive history of the conflict, he briefly, yet carefully, maps the contextual backgrounds of the insurgency in 1991 and subsequent violent movements. Though there is a slight disconnect from the previous discussion of the theoretical and historical terrains that have driven the development and persistence of evolutionist epistemology in Africanism, the chapter's descriptive analysis makes it easier for readers to navigate through the following investigations of complex issues and events in the armed conflict as well as their interpretations. The fourth chapter deciphers the major texts written mainly by Western scholars who purport to explain the Sierra Leonean war, and in so doing exposes their political and ideological commitments. These writings explicitly/implicitly attribute the war in Sierra Leone to an asserted social pathology that fails to ascend the unilinear evolutionary chain and/or simply reduce the conflict to violent competition over economic resources. Wai argues that such vulgar universalistic and reductionist interpretations of the conflict serve ‘the purpose of justifying and legitimating past and ongoing imperial power relations and impulses’ (144). In the fifth chapter, attention is shifted to Sierra Leonean academic reflections on the conflict. Mobilised as a response to and, more precisely, dissatisfaction with Western interpretations of the insurgency, Sierra Leonean intellectuals highlight the post-independence sociohistorical and political realities within which the conflict emerged. It is important, however, as Wai points out, to recognise that much of the discourse constructed by Sierra Leonean scholars through their elitist lenses, which themselves emanate from the internalised colonial library, largely remains within the frames of Africanism and fails to capture the ‘multiple complexes and paradoxes that animated the conflict’ (218).
Thus, this book effectively deconstructs the positivist and evolutionist paradigm in which the intrinsic linkage between the European ‘will to truth’ and ‘will to power’ not only underlines the discursive production of African realities, but also naturalises and justifies the Western imperial domination over the continent. Yet, in recalling Wai's motivation that animates this project, the book does not precisely clarify how far and in what ways his own experience of the civil war in Sierra Leone differs from dominant interpretations. Related to this, another salient question left unaddressed is: how is it possible to create alternative historiographies about social phenomena in Africa, especially in relation to conflicts, by accounting for the lived experiences and struggles of subaltern social groups that are largely neglected in the dominant discourses? Posing these questions to Wai perhaps involves the danger of academic egoism, which imposes an obligation on the insiders who lived through the conflicts to speak about their own experiences for the purposes of knowledge advancement. Nevertheless, it is hopeful that the future work by Wai, as a critical student of IR/IPE with intimate knowledge of the socio-economic and political landscapes of the African continent and Sierra Leone in particular, will explicitly tackle this challenge in pursuing possibilities to think and act beyond the disciplinary frames of Africanism.
Such anticipation aside, Epistemologies of African conflicts provides many original and important insights in rethinking the meanings and foundations of contemporary African conflicts. This is a must-read for scholars in the disciplines of African and security studies, and will be invaluable to anyone concerned with postcolonial power/knowledge dynamics both within and outside the walls of academia.