Economic Motivations for War, the Primary Fuel of Conflicts Across Africa: The Case of the Anglophone Crisis in Cameroon

Armed conflicts in Africa are traditionally framed through narratives of ethnic polarization, post-colonial institutional failures, and socio-political marginalization. While these structural grievances form the foundational baseline of civil discord, they fail to explain the protracted duration, resilience, and self-sustaining micro-level dynamics of modern insurgencies. This article provides a comprehensive analysis that harmonizes the intellectual history of economic warfare with the contemporary Greed vs. Grievance framework to analyze the Anglophone Crisis in Cameroon (2016–Present). Historically grounded in the erosion of post-colonial Anglo-Saxon institutional, legal, and educational structures, the crisis has systematically devolved into a highly lucrative, decentralized war economy. Utilizing a hybrid political economy model, this study investigates how state actors, the military, and non-state armed groups (separatist "Amba boys") exploit their strategic positions to accumulate private wealth through kidnapping for ransom, smuggling networks, illicit checkpoint taxation, and the diversion of humanitarian resources. Meanwhile, the civilian population experiences catastrophic output shocks, severe human capital erosion, and deep, intergenerational poverty. This article models the asymmetric distributions of conflict rents, mapping out how the divergence between aggregate societal costs and private elite returns paralyzes peace initiatives and incentivizes spoilers across both sides of the domestic divide. The paper concludes with actionable, institutional, and structural policy recommendations designed to alter the microeconomic payoff structures of the conflict, paving a pathway toward sustainable peace.

Conflict Economics, Greed and Grievance, War Economy, Anglophone Crisis, Cameroon, Rent Extraction, Political Economy of Violence, Sub-Saharan Africa.

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