Since the First World War at the latest, the war economy has become an essential part of the Western world's economy as such and has thus altered the relationship between war and politics (Virilio and Lotringer, 1984:49ff.). If Clausewitz could still define war as the continuation of politics by other means, politics gradually receded into the background as the destructive power of armaments increased. In recent decades, the technical development of weapons has reached the point where it is no longer possible to imagine a political goal commensurate with the potential for annihilation (Arendt, 1985:7). The perfection of the means of violence is on the point of precluding its goal, the waging of war (ibid:9). But unfortunately, the development of the means of destruction has not led to an end to wars. Today, wars take place because the enormous war economy necessitates the testing of new and the scrapping of old weapons technologies (Theweleit, 1991:191ff.). With the introduction of a new generation of electronic weapons in the Western industrial countries, trade in and sales of the old, now technologically obsolete weapons to the so-called Third World has increased. These arms exports, the collapse of the socialist bloc in Eastern Europe and thus the end of the Cold War's precarious balance of power, the Bretton Woods institutions’ prescription of democratization in many states, and the formation of resistance movements just as ‘predatory’ as the ‘predatory’ states they oppose (cf. Darbon, 1990) have all contributed to an increase in wars in Africa: in Somalia, Liberia, the former Zaire, Rwanda, and Uganda.

Political scientists and developmental sociologists primarily - and less so anthropologists - attempted to grapple with the new conditions in Africa and to do justice to them in their scientific discourses. With few exceptions, by contrast, anthropologists excluded war from their theoretical discussion (cf. Clastres, 1977:25). Although Evans- Pritchard, Callaway, Junod, and Roscoe, for example, all carried out their research in the midst of violent conflicts, this was barely mentioned in their monographs, though they certainly described the violent clashes in their personal letters and diaries (cf. Thornton, 1983:513ff.).