Over four centuries ago, enchained Africans were forced to cross the Atlantic in the bowels of slave ships. They were beasts of burden working on behalf of increasing Western capitalism. Today they are crossing the Mediterranean freely in search of safety (security). Some of the immigrants drowned off the Italian coast...

Africans are known to celebrate life very often and in many ways. And yet their continent is under fire: death spread everywhere through civil wars, ethnic conflicts, famine and various diseases. This first chapter is an understanding of the political instability in Africa from that particular angle of a paradox.

Where is the discussion on stability in Africa or how others have treated the question? My response is essentially focused on the state crisis theory at work nowadays. In times of crisis in a country, the state explodes and lacks the capacity to maintain political stability or to control the population. Many practitioners and scholars of Western institutions provide African leaders...

The main cause of instability in Africa is the struggle for political power and the control of economic resources. In order to develop a resolution to this question, I reflect on how to manage a consensus in power-sharing. The problem of political power can be solved not by restoring the scrambled postcolonial state (power) but by including minority and majority in the...

Ideological divergences and political options do not threaten the stability of a country. The only threatening conflict is a conflict of interests; it is fueled whenever mostly the State has been considered as the sole source of power.

Stability in Africa is not only about rebellions and inter-ethnic conflicts within a national territory; it is also about interstate conflicts: Chad versus Libya, Cameroon versus Nigeria, Congo (DRC) versus Rwanda, etc. The list goes on. How can these African countries promote stability? The unity of the continent has always been one of the responses to the question. It requires from these...

It is within such a political context that I inscribe the question of stability. That stability is not only about security or securitization but also about the structures that regulate human behavior and generate a sense of justice within the citizens. In the Western tradition of philosophy, the topic of stability has been treated with Thomas Hobbes after the Thirty Years War, with...

Emmanuel Bueya is professor of philosophy in the Democratic Republic of Congo. He studied philosophy, theology, and political science in Kinshasa (DRC), in Nairobi (Kenya), and in Boston (USA). After the completion of his doctorate at Boston College, he went back in his home country. Currently he teaches African philosophy at Loyola University of Congo and conducts researches on social...