Introduction

Summary

The labels ‘state fragility’ and ‘civil war’ suggest that security in several African countries has broken down. While people do experience insecurity in some parts of conflict-affected countries, in other areas they live in relative security. Between 2014 and 2018, the author travelled to South Sudan and the Central African Republic during their ongoing civil wars and into Somalia’s breakaway state of Somaliland to gain insights from the people whose security is at stake. He develops the concept of a ‘security arena’, wherein he investigate security as the outcome of actors’ local political-ordering struggles on a fluidity–stability spectrum. He finds that neither stable nor fluid ordering per se creates security or insecurity. Security improves when actors seek to cohabit all parts of arenas by using varying ordering forms in a complementary fashion.