Race, Resistance and Recruitment: Evidence from French West Africa

• In Event: Protesters, Soldiers and the State: Re-Examining Military Response to Resistance

Abstract

Under what conditions did ethnic bias emerge within early African militaries? Most scholarship on African armies assume colonial officials intentionally favored the selection of certain ethnic or racial groups into the armed forces, leading to long-term biases in their structural make-up, with consequences for coup-proofing and civil-military relations. In theory, under-recruitment of certain ethnic groups was a European response to precolonial centralization and related degrees of violent resistance to the state. This paper challenges these assumptions, by drawing on novel data on resistance and time-series cross sectional data on colonial military recruitment in French West Africa beginning in World War I. Contrary to expectations, violent resistance led to brief periods of over-recruitment, but is not associated with lasting biases. Further, the expressed preferences of colonial officers were not associated with ethnic or regional biases in the data. Instead, widespread non-violent resistance—in the form of foot-dragging and draft evasion—led to lasting, though narrow, under-recruitment of certain groups. This paper suggests these biases emerged largely as an incidental part of the state-building process, as the French were forced to accommodate military policy in regions where ground-up challenges with enumeration and oversight made conscription particularly difficult. The paper further elaborates on these regional trends with mixed-methods cases studies on Mauritania, Guinea and Burkina Faso.

Author

• Lindsey Pruett, Cornell University