Lines on a Map, Lines in the Mind

What Africa’s Conflicts Reveal About the West’s Future

We are often told, as if it were self-evident, that Africa’s chronic instability is the result of Europeans drawing arbitrary borders, forcing tribes with little in common to share a single state. In this narrative, “artificial” colonial boundaries that lumped together diverse ethnic groups are blamed for endless strife across the continent. The moral is supposed to be obvious, European colonialism was uniquely destructive, and Western guilt should be eternal.

But this neat morality tale contains a problem the narrators seldom acknowledge. If the mere fact of ethnic diversity inevitably produces tension and conflict, why haven’t modern Western cities, now as kaleidoscopically diverse as any colonial-era borderland, erupted into the same kind of open tribal warfare? Why are London, New York, or Sydney not aflame with ethnic civil war, even as countries like Sudan or the D.R. Congo struggle with internal conflicts often explained by their patchwork of peoples? There are only two possible answers, and both are uncomfortable for the prevailing progressive conscience:

• Inherent Resilience Hypothesis: The West simply possesses cultural, institutional, or civilisational traits that make it “better” at managing diversity, an implicit claim of Western exceptionalism that the modern egalitarian worldview emphatically forbids.

• Material Peace Hypothesis: The West’s current stability rests on circumstantial advantages, decades of material abundance, welfare states, and the ability to buy social peace. In other words, remove the comfort and prosperity, and we too might descend into the same kind of ethnic factionalism seen elsewhere.

Africa’s conflicts are often blamed on “lines on a map” drawn by outsiders, but perhaps they have more to do with lines in the mind, identities and divisions that, under stress, can overpower even the neatest of national borders. This exploration carries a warning: what has happened there, will happen here.

Colonialism as the Evergreen Alibi

Arbitrary colonial borders have long been the evergreen alibi for Africa’s troubles. Time and again, analysts and leaders point out that the borders of modern African states were drawn in European capitals with scant regard for Africa’s ethnic patchwork. Indeed, many African countries encompass dozens of ethnic groups, and many groups were split across multiple countries, a legacy of the Scramble for Africa. Studies have quantified the destructive impact: civil conflicts have been significantly more frequent and prolonged in areas where colonial borders partitioned ethnic communities, compared to areas where ethnic groups remained intact within one polity. In short, the map itself is blamed for much of Africa’s instability.

Colonial powers did “jam together” tribes and nations with rival histories and religions, often after pitting them against each other via divide-and-rule tactics. Post-independence, African leaders chose to preserve those colonial borders (to avoid even greater chaos), but that very choice meant internal ethnic tensions continued to simmer within the inherited states. The result has been what one scholar called a “zero-sum conflict of identities” inside many African countries. Virtually every major African civil war has an ethno-regional dimension, as groups vie for power or survival within colonial-era frontiers.

However, the colonial-borders thesis often becomes a convenient cudgel of moral history: it frames African violence as purely an imported European problem, implicitly absolving post-colonial actors of agency. It also ignores that inter-tribal warfare and social strife were hardly unknown in Africa before colonisation. Pre-colonial Africa had its empires, conquests, and migrations, from the Mfecane wars in southern Africa to the jihadi states in West Africa which redrew ethnic boundaries by fire and blood long before any European drew a line on a map.

Colonialism poured fuel on existing embers and carved new fault lines, but it did not invent the concept of ethnic conflict. In fact, European rule often did the opposite, it subdued tribal warfare by imposing an external authority strong enough to stop rivals from butchering each other. The so-called “Pax Britannica” was less about enlightenment and more about control, but it still froze conflicts that would otherwise have continued unchecked. To pretend that Africa was a peaceful Eden until Europeans arrived is historical fantasy. Ethnic violence is as old as Africa itself; colonialism simply redirected and reshaped it.

This it is just to say that explaining, for example, ethnic war in South Sudan or Nigeria solely by the wrong borders is an explanation that doesn’t travel well. If diversity and historical grievances automatically lead to chaos, how do multiethnic countries elsewhere manage any measure of peace? This brings us to the paradox at the heart of the narrative.

The Diversity Paradox

The same voices that attribute African conflict to excessive diversity and “tribalism” often insist that diversity is a strength in Western nations. This is the diversity paradox. Western political elites speak of multiculturalism in glowing terms, “Diversity is our strength,” Canada’s Prime Minister Trudeau famously said, arguing his country succeeds not in spite of differences but because of them. In cosmopolitan Western cities, high levels of ethnic pluralism are celebrated as cultural enrichment and progressive triumph.

Yet, in the next breath, those observing Africa lament that its plethora of tribes and tongues is a source of endless turmoil, an impediment to development and good governance. Development economists have long noted that, in sub-Saharan Africa, ethnic fragmentation correlates with weaker public goods provision, political instability, and even civil strife. One influential study famously argued that Africa’s “growth tragedy” was due in part to its high ethnic diversity, which made consensus and nation-building harder, and fostered rent-seeking competitions between groups. In plainer terms, the claim is that when a country is split into many ethnic factions, it tends to spend more time infighting and less time governing well.

Material Peace as a Brittle Peace

One explanation for why multiethnic Western countries have been relatively stable is brutally pragmatic: money, infrastructure and welfare buy peace. Prosperous nations can distribute enough resources and opportunities that, for most people most of the time, ethnic grievances don’t turn into shooting wars. There is truth to this. Modern welfare states were, in part, explicitly designed to mitigate social conflict, Bismarck’s pioneering social insurance in Germany was instituted to “buy social peace” and preempt civil unrest. Likewise, post-World War II welfare policies in Europe helped ensure that class or ethnic discontents were smoothed over with economic security. Shared prosperity gives diverse societies a margin of error that fragile poor states lack.

Furthermore, strong state institutions in the West (police, courts, bureaucracy) act as a restraint on inter-group violence. If a riot breaks out, the state can clamp down; if discrimination occurs, there are laws (at least in principle) to address it. In poorer states with weak institutions, violence can spiral because the government lacks capacity or legitimacy to stop it. So, wealth and governance are the critical shock absorbers that have kept Western diversity mostly peaceful so far.

The key phrase, however, is “so far.” History provides ample evidence that this peace can be alarmingly brittle if underlying conditions change. When economic crises hit or state authority erodes, the veneer of harmony can disappear with frightening speed. Social scientists have found a strong correlation between economic stress and conflict: when incomes collapse or unemployment spikes, the risk of civil unrest rises significantly. Ample evidence shows that societies are more prone to violent upheaval during depressions, hyperinflation, or sharp inequality, especially if particular ethnic groups feel left behind. In other words, comfort is a powerful peacekeeper and conversely, desperation is a powerful war-stoker.

We saw a glimpse of this dynamic in the former Yugoslavia. Through the 1970s, Yugoslavia was relatively well-off and certainly well-managed for a multi-ethnic state; Tito’s authoritarian regime kept a lid on nationalist passions while the economy delivered steady growth. But by the late 1980s, that prosperity had evaporated, the federal state was mired in debt and austerity, living standards were falling, and the communist political order was faltering. Without the balm of prosperity and with the central authority weakening, ethnic resentments that had been dormant roared back to life. Politicians like Slobodan Milošević stoked Serb nationalism; Slovenes and Croats, seeing no benefit in Yugoslav unity anymore, prepared to secede. The result was the Balkan wars of the 1990s, a once-stable diverse society exploding into genocidal violence when its material and political glue disintegrated. The lesson was that diverse populations can live together mostly peacefully under a functional economy and state, but if those conditions vanish, in group preferencing arises and peace can vanish with them.

The Looming Stressors for the West

All of this leads to an unnerving question, could the West face a similar reckoning? Are the United States, UK, France, or Australia immune to the laws of history or have they simply not yet faced the kind of severe test that can crack their social cohesion? As the opening paradox suggests, either the West is somehow exceptional at managing diversity (by virtue of culture or institutions), or its present harmony is contingent and fragile. The coming decades will subject Western societies to stress tests of their own, and we may not like the results.

Several looming stressors could threaten the material and institutional pillars of Western stability:

• Economic Stagnation or Collapse: After WWII, Western nations enjoyed unparalleled economic growth and industrial expansion, raising living standards across the board. But growth has slowed, inequality has risen, and large swaths of the population feel left behind in the post-industrial economy. If a major economic crisis hits, worse than 2008, for instance or if decades of wage stagnation continue, the ability to “buy” social peace through prosperity diminishes. Competition for scarce resources (jobs, housing, welfare) could increasingly align with ethnic or cultural lines.

• Political Polarisation and Institutional Erosion: The West’s vaunted institutions, democracy, rule of law, impartial bureaucracy are under strain from within. Political polarisation is at record highs in the United States and increasing in parts of Europe. Populist movements challenge the legitimacy of traditional elites, sometimes explicitly on ethnic or religious grounds (e.g., nativist parties in Europe, white nationalist rhetoric in America). If these trends lead to governmental paralysis or a breakdown in the rule of law, it removes another buffer against inter-group conflict. A weak state that cannot enforce order or appears biased toward one group quickly loses the loyalty of other groups. Extreme polarisation can also create identity-based factions even within a formally single culture, effectively, politicising cultural lines in a way that resembles sectarianism. In the worst case, constitutional crises or contested elections in diverse societies could spiral into civil unrest along racial or regional lines.

• Diminishing Common Identity: For a brief window of time, Western nations managed to construct civic identities, “American,” “French,” “Australian” that papered over their ethnic roots. For a while it has worked. But today that myth is collapsing under the weight of demographic reality. Civic nationalism only functions when there is a clear cultural core that everyone else orbits around. Strip that out, and all you’re left with is competing tribes clawing for resources inside the same borders.

None of these stressors guarantees a descent into conflict, but they remove the conditions that have historically dampened conflict. When wealth, stability and strong institutions fade, the latent potential for fragmentation grows. The critical question is whether Western cultures have an X-factor, some deeply ingrained norms of tolerance or conflict resolution that will carry them through even when times get tough.However, betting the future on an assumption of inherent Western immunity to strife would be foolhardy, even arrogant, in light of historical and global evidence.

As one conflict scholar noted in the African context, inequality and group grievance, if unaddressed, will eventually find expression in conflict. The West is not magically exempt from this human condition. We already see hints, outbreaks of racial unrest in the U.S. and rising anti-immigrant sentiment in recession-hit parts of Europe.

Conclusion

Ultimately, Africa’s conflicts teach a sobering lesson about our shared human nature. The lines on a map, the borders of states, turn out to be less important than the lines in the mind. When those mental lines harden into an “us vs. them” and fear or scarcity enters the equation, the formal niceties of passports and constitutions offer little protection. In Rwanda, neighbours with the same national ID turned on each other as Hutu vs. Tutsi; in Yugoslavia, people who had lived as Yugoslavs for decades suddenly saw only Serb, Croat or Bosniaks. The nominal state borders remained but became meaningless as societies split along internal seams.

The West has enjoyed a long holiday from history, a period of peace and plenty where diversity could be managed without outright civil war. That period may be drawing to a close. If the pillars of Western stability, economic growth, strong institutions, a unifying civic creed, demographic homogeneity continue to erode, we may discover that we are not so exceptional after all. The same primal forces that drive conflict in “fragile” states exist in every society, including rich democracies. Prosperity and good governance suppress those forces; adversity can unleash them.