Religion and African Civil Wars Neil Kastfelt The many civil wars in contemporary Africa raise important questions about the causes and cultural meaning of this and other forms of violent conflict. Masked soldiers in Liberia, the proclamation of the war in Southern Sudan as a jihad, the formulation of the Hutu Ten Commandments in Rwanda and the establishment of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission is South Africa have all provoked questions about the role of religion in these conflicts. The claim behind this book is that many African civil wars deserve study in their own right - without ignoring their social, political and economic context. Geographically the chapters focus on four areas - the Southern Sudan, Central Africa, the Sierra Leone/Liberia/Guinea Region, and Southern Africa. (Except notably in Sudan, Islam plays a relatively small role in these conflicts). Modern civil wars have revived or strengthened old stereotypes of Africa and Africans. The continent is again portrayed as steeped in superstition and tribal warfare that escape the normally rational criteria for analyzing warfare and social conflict. To avoid this line of interpretation the civil wars of contemporary Africa need to be discussed in their proper historical and conceptual context. They are not of a type that is peculiar to post-colonial Africa. They are indeed African and have local roots, but they take place in the most violent extended period of world history. One feature of the book is a concern not to exoticise post-colonial violence in Africa. For instance the region from the Southern Sudan through northern Uganda to Rwanda, Burundi and Congo - now the scene of brutal wars and genocide - has a long history of colonial violence in the form of slave trading, slave labour, plantation terror and gun culture. What may appear an exceptionally high occurrence of civil wars may be new manifestation of old conflicts, in both their political and cultural-religious dimensions. The editor, Niels Kasfelt , is a lecturer at the Institute of Church History and the Centre for African Studies, University of Copenhagen, and the author of Religion and Politics ion Nigeria (1994). Notes about other contributors are at the front of the book.