Universities at Risk: Explaining Organized Student Violence at African Universities

Improving access to higher education is heralded as a central component of promoting democracy and peace.

For these reasons international donors are investing considerable resources in strengthening universities in the ‘Global South’. Despite this, universities are often fraught by organized violence in many developing countries. This constitutes a serious problem.

Not only does the militarization of campuses risk degrading the quality of higher education, but also foster a new generation of leaders who use violence as a tool for political contestation. There is currently a lack of studies investigating universities as sites of violent mobilization.

The purpose of this project is therefore to explain under what conditions university based organized violence is most likely to erupt.

We propose that violence is particularly likely when there is competition between political elites to control the mobilization capacity of campuses.

Under such circumstances, marginalized students have incentives to engage in violence in order to be integrated into elites’ patronage networks.

To address the question at hand we will collect novel data on the prevalence of organized violence across African universities (1989-2021) and statistically analyze its causes. We will combine this with a comparison of two Nigerian universities.

The project will be based at Uppsala University during 2023-25 and has two participating researchers–Anders Themnér (principal investigator) and Hanne Fjelde.