Abstract
Identity politics are nothing new in global history, nor are they particular to present-day African conflicts. The political instrumentalization of belonging—often linked to land and myths of origin—has long been a core driver for the creation of communities and nations, the justification of war and racism, and claims to citizenship and resources. Yet, a brief look at contentious politics in the early twenty-first century illustrates that politicians and governments are increasingly mobilizing identity politics as a means of responding to popular anxiety and fueling sectarian politics using populism. From Trump's America and the Gaza War to Fortress Europe and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, not to mention Brexit and, as well, India's nationalist turn—examples are legion and, despite stark contextual variation, align on some broader tenets of justifying exclusionary or violent politics with claims around identity, belonging, and origin.
Gino Vlavonou's book, Belonging, Identity, and Conflict in the Central African Republic, offers a novel and much welcome critical perspective on these questions. Perched at the geographical centre of Africa, the Central African Republic is not only a prime victim of global ignorance—few people outside the continent know where it is—but also a peculiar case of violent colonialism. Owing to its impenetrable terrain, current-day Central African Republic long had been a sparsely populated intersection between North and South, West and East of the continent. Even before the French colonized the territory (then called Ubangi-Shari) in the late nineteenth century, Muslim sultanates and Western slave-traders regularly entered the territory in slave-raiding expeditions. Later, under French rule, Ubangi-Shari essentially served as a plunder economy outsourced to private corporations for profit by a weak colonial government. Eventually gaining its independence as the Central African Republic, a dearth of infrastructure and neocolonial interference gave rise to a series of coups, counter-coups, and predatory governments, until 2012, when a major armed conflict broke out.
Despite a set of foreign interventions, including elections and disarmament programs, that were intended to stabilize—paraphrasing a fashionable mantra of conflict resolution—the country, conflict and violence has not subsided. This is where Vlavonou enters, offering a thought-provoking, nuanced analysis of how identity politics have shaped and continue to shape the quagmire in the Central African Republic. If orthodox analyses put forward the country's natural resource wealth or conflicts between Muslim and Christian populations, the book overcomes simplistic, positivist tropes by leveraging the ways in which Central Africans themselves explain the war. Vlavounou's key contribution turns around autochthony—a term vigorously debated, with uneven etymological histories across different languages. Through the emic notion of the vrai Centrafricain (“true Central African”), the book understands autochthony as a Bourdieusian identity capital rather than a form of physical belonging to an (imagined) homeland. Revisiting a rich literature covering questions of belonging, identity, and conflict, Vlavonou conceptualizes autochthony as an empty category, something that needs to be filled with political meaning—as opposed to ethnic or religious identities, which, even if constructed or contested, are defined by some sort of content.
The proposition of autochthony without land is novel and convincing in several ways. First, it departs from dominant scholarship about land, resources, and conflict and its ideational and political blind spots. Secondly, it offers a new perspective on sectarian violence and conflict by avoiding the racial clichés often underpinning classic explanations of so-called ethnic and religious wars. Moreover, Vlavonou's theoretical contribution pairs well with the contextual contours of the case study, with land scarcity or competition simply not playing much of a role then and now. Indeed, and as the raiding history of the Central African Republic tragically highlights, control over people has been far more important than control over land in this part of the world. Discourses of autochthony, in particular, if not linked to particular land claims, can have a key role in organizing polities and defining an imagined community through practices of Othering, but also form crucial elements of a political grammar that makes people's and elite discourses mutually intelligible through terms, metaphors, and codes.
Vlavonou conjugates the theoretical proposition of the first chapter through a sequence of four well-structured, complementary empirical chapters based on data collected using different methods. Drawing from ethnographic research including interviews and observation as well as discourse analysis of print and radio media, the book demonstrates how autochthony is mobilized as identity capital independent from land. As such, it crosscuts and supersedes apparent ethnic or religious cleavages and becomes a dominant driver of conflict with tangible material and political effects.
Chapter two analyzes how key stakeholders formulate autochthony from the perspective of the vrai Centrafricain and discusses counterpoints from those excluded by this definition. Here Vlavonou deconstructs the superficial cleavage between Muslims—a shortcut amalgamating vastly different people—and non-Muslims by emphasizing the political character of autochthony as identity capital, and questions the link between land and identity that is prominent in sons-of-the-soil analyses.
Chapter three traces how pre-war president François Bozizé employed autochthony as a key political and rhetoric strategy to legitimize his rule between 2003 and 2012, and how he weaponized it against political and military rivals—stoking sectarian tensions that ultimately helped provoking large-scale civil war between the Séléka CPSK-CPJP-UFDR and anti-Balaka after his demise.
In chapter four, Vlavonou looks at the evolution of mining governance to showcase how the discursive mobilization of autochthony materialized in tangible laws. Seeking to promote the vrai Centrafricain, this led to the reordering of the country's key economic sectors under a smokescreen of technical reform and to the benefit of Bozizé's government.
Finally, chapter five examines autochthony from below by looking at everyday economic interactions. A mostly Muslim neighbourhood, PK5 nonetheless hosts the most important retail market of the capital Bangui, and has become an urban centre representing identity-based competition as well as the broader conflict in the country. The reorganization of PK5 within an environment of suspicion and contestation highlights the broader popular recognition of autochthony as organizing political principle.
In sum, Belonging, Identity and Conflict in the Central African Republic is a unique and stimulating contribution to the study of identity politics, post-colonial governance, and contemporary civil war with the potential of becoming a modern classic. While it provides a grounded, evidence-based case study of key conflict drivers in the Central African Republic, the book clarifies our understanding of belonging and identity by proposing the idea of autochthony without land as a powerful form of identity capital in contemporary conflict and politics worldwide. In carefully analyzing the discursive workings of autochthony, Vlavonou also re-problematizes the relations between elites and the people in the context of identity politics—a particularly timely question in current affairs worldwide.