Reviewed by: The Independentistnews Editorial Desk
Carlson Anyangwe’s Contemporary Wars and Conflicts over Land and Water in Africa is a serious, scholarly interrogation of why violence persists across the African continent long after the end of formal colonial rule. The book’s central argument is both clear and compelling: Africa’s wars are not random eruptions of chaos but are deeply rooted in unresolved struggles over land, water, territory, borders, and governance—many of them inherited directly from colonial arrangements that were never properly settled.
Drawing on history, international law, and political analysis, Anyangwe maps a wide range of conflicts—civil wars, interstate disputes, boundary disagreements, and transnational violence—into a single analytical framework. In doing so, the book succeeds in elevating African conflicts beyond the lazy tropes of “ethnic violence” or “state failure,” instead exposing the structural drivers that continue to destabilize societies.
One of the book’s strengths is its restraint. It avoids sensationalism and moral grandstanding, opting instead for methodical explanation. This makes it especially valuable for students, policymakers, and serious readers seeking to understand why conflicts endure rather than merely where they occur. Yet it is precisely because of this analytical rigor that a significant omission becomes evident.
The Missing Case
Despite its thematic breadth, the book does not devote sustained attention to the conflict in Ambazonia. This absence is striking—not because Ambazonia demands special pleading, but because it fits the book’s own thesis with unusual clarity.
Ambazonia represents a conflict born directly from an unresolved colonial settlement, centered on land, governance, and political consent. It involves strategic territory, fertile land, waterways, and coastal access, alongside large-scale civilian displacement and militarisation. It also exposes the limitations of continental and international conflict-resolution mechanisms—precisely the institutional weaknesses the book identifies elsewhere. In short, Ambazonia is not an outlier. It is a textbook example of the very dynamics the book sets out to explain.
Why the Omission Matters
Leaving Ambazonia unexamined subtly reinforces a state-centric framing in which certain conflicts are absorbed into the internal affairs of postcolonial states, rather than interrogated as unresolved decolonisation questions involving land and political legitimacy. This does not undermine the book’s argument, but it does leave it incomplete.
Including Ambazonia as a dedicated case study would have strengthened the work by: – testing its framework against a legally and historically coherent self-determination claim, deepening its treatment of land and governance as primary conflict drivers, and expanding its discussion of viable resolution pathways beyond military containment.
Verdict
Contemporary Wars and Conflicts over Land and Water in Africa remains an important and authoritative contribution to African conflict studies. Its value lies in its clarity, scope, and refusal to reduce African wars to simplistic explanations.
However, the absence of the Ambazonian conflict stands as a notable gap—one that future editions or companion volumes would do well to address. By the book’s own logic, Ambazonia is not peripheral to Africa’s contemporary conflicts; it is emblematic of them.
For readers seeking to understand Africa’s wars through the lenses of land, water, borders, and unfinished history, this book is essential. For those concerned with what remains unresolved on the continent, it also points—perhaps unintentionally—to the cases that still demand serious scholarly and international attention.
The Independentistnews editorial desk
Leave feedback about this