Reconciling the Self with the Other: An Existentialist Perspective on the Management of Ethnic Conflicts in Africa

Abstract

Nation states we may call them, but recent ethnic conflicts in most parts of African states clearly reflect that these states are far from attaining the nationhood status. Unending postulations regarding reasons and solutions to the unending crisis in African states seem to have had no lasting effects. One major reason this has been the case is that theoreticians on political conflicts in Africa have ignored the role of the human consciousness or the human Cognito, the I or the Self, in human social organization. Our attempt in this work is to extrapolate certain elements in the works of some existentialist philosophers like Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Buber and Marcel as means of resolving ethnic conflicts in Asia.