7 Armed Conflicts in Postcolonial Africa and the Democratic Peace Theory Ubong Essien Umoh Department of History & International Studies University of Uyo, Nigeria ubongessienumoh@yahoo.com Abstract The Democratic Peace theory argues in part that democracies hardly go to war against each other. This western normative logic has been one of the strong arguments for the spread and consolidation of democracy in the African continent and elsewhere. Democracy as argued by the democratic peace proponents holds the ace for peace everywhere since institutional constraints and periodic elections checkmate the excessive use and abuse of military power by elected leaders. Does the democratic peace theory hold sway for African states? Is democracy a necessary precondition for peace in Africa? Leaning on the normative lessons of this theory, most western states have made it a part of their foreign policy thrust and strategy to clothe African states with democracy in an attempt to ensure peace in the continent. The legacy such strategy leaves behind is that such states neither evolve into full democracies nor stable autocracies. The paper argues that peace based on democratic consolidation in Africa has increasingly made the continent more conflict prone as democratising states have shown greater tendency to experience armed conflicts than stable autocracies. Introduction The end of the Cold War in a way marked a symbol for the victory of democracy over other alternative forms of government. 1 The post-cold war period witnessed the export of democracy and democratic structures to undemocratic regions of the world of which Africa was a part. This export of Western liberal democracy to various parts of the globe has been driven by the desire to secure a more peaceful world by the West. This has been the central position of the democratic peace theory which argues that liberal democracies are inherently peaceful (monadic assumption) and hardly go to war with each other (dyadic and systemic assumption). Democratic states as argued by the proponents of this theory are said to often resolve their differences on the bargaining table rather than the battle field. Norms of compromise and cooperation prevent their conflicts of interest from escalating into armed conflict. Moreover, complex political mobilisation processes impose institutional constraints on leaders of two democracies confronting each other to prevent armed conflicts. 1 This position has been given credence by Francis Fukuyama who sees democracy as the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the ‘universalisation’ of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government. See Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, New York: The Free Press, 1992.