Civilians, Arms and Endemic Conflicts in Africa

Abstract

How did arms ever get into the hands of civilians in the first place? We are aware of the fact that arms, to a large extent, were originally designed to serve as deterrence against forms of external aggression on territorial sovereignty. In the African case, arms are arguable believed to have gained access into the continent via colonialist activities, and could never have been intended for civilian uses. The current trend of conflict event in Africa shows that civilians are dominant participants in the several conflict situations in Africa. This study will attempt to discover what has lead to this unfortunate situation. This researcher consulted several scholarly secondary sources of information in generating data for this study, making the work more of a qualitative research. Several social, economic and maybe physical factors are responsible for the incessant use of arms by civilians: failure of governance, declining economic capacity of states, growing youthful population, the list goes on. If one is to make any predictions, following the trend of events, civilians, unfortunately, will remain key actors in the use of arms for the foreseeable future, in fact this may well be just the beginning of non-state actors getting involved with arms.