Failing States, Collapsing Systems BioPhysical Triggers of Political Violence by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed

Author:Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed [Ahmed, Nafeez Mosaddeq]
Language: ita
Format: epub
Published: 2016-11-25T11:28:36+00:00

Chapter 8

Biophysical Triggers of Crisis Convergence in Africa

The same fundamental ESD processes unfolding in the Middle East are also happening in Africa, with similar deleterious consequences in aggravating the societal potential for violent confl ict. Here we examine two distinctive cases: Nigeria in West Africa, and Egypt in North Africa. In both cases, HSD is occurring in the form of the increasing destabilization of the state. This destabilization is being driven by ESD phenomena comprising interconnected environmental, energy and economic crises.

Conventional policy and media narratives focus on short-sighted counter-terrorism responses and other measures to shore-up state power in these countries—essentially a combination of military and fi nancial empowerment designed to expand state-national territorial integrity, by increasing its monopoly in the means of violence, and advancing its capacity to deliver public goods and services using cheap debt-money via low interest fi nancing.

Yet neither of these responses are capable of enhancing the state’s resilience to ESD—only of enhancing the state’s capacity to react to escalating symptoms of HSD. In doing so, an increasingly militarized response to HSD is incapable of ameliorating HSD—because such radicalized, militarized state responses are themselves forms of political violence that contribute to the escalation of HSD, and tend to elicit further forms of reactionary violence from local publics. Meanwhile, as the fundamental structural causes of escalating ESD remain unchecked, this paves the way for crisis convergence to occur yet again in the near future as ESD processes continue to accelerate with little amelioration.

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