Contemporary Wars in Africa or 21st Century Competition for Power

Abstract

Lately the African continent has been the focus of global attention and discussions on the present and future of Africa, especially with regards to the highly topical questions concerning the global and African state of peace and security. As multiple extremely complex armed conflicts continue to cause chronic instability and vulnerabilities in several African states and regions, they also directly affect the state of international security in the 21st century in an intensively interconnected and globalized world from an economic, political and peace/security perspective. Accordingly, this research article offers an in-depth analysis of some of the major causes and explanations of the existing wars in Africa related to the illicit exploitation of resources, vulnerability, and control. The goal of this work is to reveal and analyze the complexity of 21st-century wars in Africa and their deep interrelated causes by applying the example of the long and banal armed conflicts in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Thus, the authors argue that the destabilization of the political and socio-economic situation in Africa, and DRC in particular, is directly connected to local and regional conflicts over access to various forms of resources, influence, and power, but also to the artificially created chaos by various interested power parties for expansion, profit, and hope for further profit. In this sense, it has been emphasized that conflicts of so-called ‘low intensity’, artificially maintained over a long period of time, pose no lesser degree of threat to the regional state of peace and security.