The Role of Education in the Continuation of Civil Wars in Eastern and Southern Africa

Africa has had the largest number of civil war occurrences since independence (Aiyede, 2010). In addition, the conflict situation has not changed significantly over the past few decades (Aiyede, 2010). This research examined the reason why armed conflicts have continued to occur in Africa by investing civil wars from a new perspective: education. The aim of this study is not to depoliticize conflict, but to investigate the primary determinant for civil wars. Therefore, the impact different levels of education have on the number of civil wars in Africa is what this study examines. By education, datasets of primary and secondary school enrolment in Eastern and Southern Africa is gathered. As for civil wars, the variables of internal armed conflict and extra systemic armed conflict are investigated. This shows that the independent variables are primary and secondary school enrolment and the dependent variables are internal and extra systemic armed conflict. The relations between the two sets of variables are investigated using statistical analysis and econometric models via the software SPSS and STATA. The datasets are gathered from Uppsala Institute of Civil Wars and World Bank Datasets 2013, and the binary code of 1 and 0 are used, where 1 indicates the presence of civil war and 0 indicates the absence of civil war. Overall, this study investigates whether the lack of education is the main reason for the occurrence of civil wars in Eastern and Southern Africa. The existing literatures on civil wars in Africa have argued that income per capita, ethno-linguistic fragmentation and poverty are highly correlated with civil wars (Collier and Heoffler 2002, 15-16; Elbadawi and Sambanis 2007, 308-9; Collier 2003, 40). However, because correlation does not mean causation, the latter variables are regarded as the intervening variables which exasperate the occurrence of armed conflicts.