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Accommodation Works Better for Reducing Conflict

Alan J. Kuperman’s edited volume, Constitutions and Conflict Management in Africa (2015), is an impressive attempt to evaluate in the African context the efficacy of two different forms of constitutional design: accommodation (the protection of various groups through their formal inclusion in the political system), and integration (the promotion of a single unified national identity through more centralized institutions). As I argued in my own recent monograph, Democracy in Africa: Successes, Failures and the Struggle for Political Reform (2015), the failure of constitutional arrangements to prevent ethnic conflict and election-related violence makes this one of the most pressing questions facing the continent. In the last two years alone, we have witnessed violent upheavals in countries as otherwise diverse as Burkina Faso, Burundi, Mali, and South Sudan. At present, the vast majority of African states are governed by highly centralized political systems—nearly 80%, according to the useful database presented by Eli Poupko in Chapter 9. This raises two critical questions. First, is there a causal relationship between the predominance of ‘integrative’ constitutions and political conflict? Second, would the introduction of more inclusive political arrangements lead to higher levels of peace and stability? In seeking to answer these questions, Kuperman marshals an impressive list of respected scholars to conduct in-depth case studies of seven countries: Burundi, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, Sudan, and Zimbabwe. The resulting book makes an important contribution to the debate and deserves broad scholarly attention for five reasons. First, it is one of the only works on Africa to look at constitutional design through a comparative lens. Second, it contains one of the first comprehensive databases of constitutional design in Africa. Third, the book shines a powerful light on one of the most overlooked aspects of constitutional design, namely the process of introducing a new constitution, and represents the most thoughtful examination to date of the way in which constitutional processes may affect Ethnopolitics, 2016 Vol. 15, No. 5, 538–545, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17449057.2016.1144414