 Thank you very much for having me here, so what I'd like to do with this presentation is open up a conversation about inter-communal violence, which is becoming a kind of category that is increasingly prominent in a lot of both academic and policy and grey literature on violence in Africa. We're starting to see it in a variety of sub-fields, on local peace-building, on post-conflict security, and particularly in Malthusian claims about climate change and conflict as well. I don't think this is desirable, I don't think the term is particularly good, I think it is imbued with a lot of meaning that we should be a bit more aware of and cautious of when we use it. So, that's what I'm going to be talking about today, we're going to look at the meaning and origins of inter-communal violence, then we're going to look at some of the problems that accompany the use of the term, and then finally, time permitting, get onto a way of potentially overcoming some of these problems. Okay, so what is inter-communal violence? We'll come back to the origins in a moment on the next slide, but for now it's worth thinking about what it was replacing, because this term is relatively recent in African studies, and that is because it ended up replacing the kind of new wars and ethnic wars discourses of the 1990s and 2000s. Now, these haven't completely gone away, but they are much less prominent compared to their heyday. They both had a number of problems, new wars generally criticised for its mistreatment of history and questionable empirics, ethnic conflicts for at least in the cruder accounts for kind of essentialising conflicts and raising more questions and answers about conflict dynamics. And I would see inter-communal violence as a kind of softer revival of some of these themes that de-emphasises the kind of identity or ethnicity aspects, but retains certain other aspects or re-emphasises, particularly the centrality of militias to understanding modern conflicts. As well as a kind of set of assumptions and claims about conflicts being essentially decentralised, the state doesn't have that much of a role in it, and they're largely apalysic, or they're not really about much. Okay, so definitions of inter-communal violence, there are some that exist, but they tend to all point to different aspects of the same sort of phenomenon. Even in cases where authors don't really define what's going on, you can kind of infer what they mean, and that is a type of violence primarily between non-states, irregular youth militias, over what are essentially local issues, often occurring at the outskirts, the fringes of state power in relatively anarchic environments, or alternatively taking the form of kind of mob violence in urban contexts. Now the term originates in 1890s British imperial accounts of violence between, of riots between Hindus and Muslims in India, that's where it actually comes from. And it was used to present this violence as being kind of spontaneous violence between two relatively evenly matched groups, that was not necessarily the case in reality. And it was used to exonerate colonial rulers from any role in this violence, it was because these were communities who were engaging in it. They would have done so without colonialism, was the implication within that. Now the language of communalism entered into Indian mainstream political discourse in the 1920s and 30s, where for those advocating for independence, freedom from colonial rule, communalism was something that needed to be overcome, for those who were more sympathetic to the British imperial project, it was something that was a powerful argument against hasty kind of independence. Now many scholars, Indian and non-Indian have extensively criticised the assumptions implicit within the kind of language of inter-communal violence. In particular one of the main problems is the way in which it wrote out elites who were actually orchestrating a lot of this violence. In later incarnations in post-independence India, the complicity of security forces in this violence also tended to be written out. And the violence was generally more one sided typically against Muslims than being a kind of contest between two evenly matched forces. So I think the term has a lot of baggage with it. It's quite a loaded term. It tends to be used as a way of, I would say, insulting a society claiming it's backward. And I think that we probably should be cautious about that. But I think also it risks smuggling in a number of distortions and misrepresentations of what's actually happening with the violence. And that I think is being carried across into its use in Africa more recently. So two countries where the discourse of communal violence is very common, Nigeria and South Sudan. This is drawing from Macled data from last year. We can see in the top left corner in northwestern Nigeria all those kind of orange dots. Those are cases of communal violence, which is often described as being between vigilantes and bandits. In South Sudan, as you can see from the light blue here, the types of actors usually associated with communal violence, so identity militias, self-defence groups, that kind of thing, have become increasingly prominent in patterns of violence, particularly since the 2018 peace agreement. Now, the way in which the governments in these countries describe this violence, they're very keen to emphasise its inter-communal nature, they're keen to emphasise it as being essentially apolitical, and they're very keen to distance themselves from that violence. So in Nigeria, as I mentioned, violence is being presented as being between bandits and vigilantes. These are euphemisms for lani pastoralists as bandits and house of farmers as vigilantes. In South Sudan, the state claims that this violence is either inter-ethnic, inter-clan or linked to unknown gunmen, which is usually understood to be the security services in reality. A lot of this stuff is reproduced by donor governments, by the UN, by other agencies who buy into these sets of claims. I mean, in the case of Nigeria, we see that actually what happened here was local elites tended to sponsor the different groups, what became bandits and vigilantes, and then they lost control of these groups. In the case of South Sudan, we often see that elites are closely linked to the formation and maintenance of these groups and will sometimes violently disarm them as well when they become too much of a problem or they risk affecting somebody else. Now, this graphic shows part of South-Western South Sudan's Western Equatorial State. Last year, there was intensive violence in Tambora, which is to the far west. Now, this violence was being presented as inter-ethnic between the Zandi and Belanda, even though these groups have no real history of serious violence. That's because in reality what was going on here was this was a set of inter-elite among the Zandi community, an inter-elite power struggle that was ethnicised in order to allow elites to advance their particular claims. There was also some economic incentives to monopolise control of the border with the Central African Republic. In Warap State, where most of South Sudan's elites come from, there was a very complex violence in 2020, some of which involves local elites who were raising militias, but also involved national elites. There was a power struggle at the apex of South Sudan's very complicated security system, where elites close to the president were getting worried about the spy master, Kulkur Kuch, and decided to attack his power base and his militias under the pretence of a disarmament campaign. That culminated in a fight that killed almost 150 people in August of 2020, and which a Kulkur's militias won against the state. Thank you. If there are these different problems that accompany the term of inter-communal violence, what can we do to overcome these or to mitigate against them or even replace this? I think there's a few things we can do. I think one of the most obvious ones is to be alert to the kind of elite interests and the role of elites in manufacturing these types of conflicts. There also elites are very capable of making conflicts appear random and anarchic, but that's not necessarily what's actually going on. I don't mean to suggest that we become conspiracy theorists who are always looking for elite interests. There's always the elites meddling, follow the money or anything like that. That would be going too far. There are, of course, instances where elites are not involved, or they were involved in the past, but are no longer involved. Nonetheless, I think it is something we should be wary of. My final point is to consider and situate the types of actors that engage in so-called communal violence within the architecture or the political and military systems that they inhabit and often form quite an important part of. This can change over time. This is a graph from last year in South Sudan. In terms of thinking about or rethinking about communal violence, I found it helpful to actually split it into different types of violence. Some of these overlap has kind of indicated on this different graph. Generally, we're talking about how closely this type of violence and the actors are linked to the national level elites on one end of the continuum and how distant they are on the other end of the continuum. These groups can and can move from being an elite proxy army into being discarded as a irregular militia, potentially targeted for disarmament. They can then make a revival in subnational contests between local elites. I think if we consider the degree to which these actors associated with intercommunal violence, the extent to which they are integrated or disintegrated from these systems, and consider and break apart the different types of violence they're actually involved in, I think we get a much richer understanding of what's actually going on. I'll leave it there. Thank you.