The Unquiet Earth: War, Developmental Violence, and Contested Peace in the Contemporary African Novel

Abstract

This article employs qualitative literary analysis to argue that contemporary
African novels by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Half of a Yellow Sun), Teju
Cole (Every Day is for the Thief), and Omar El Akkad (What Strange Paradise) fundamentally reconfigure the understanding of war, peace, and development. Moving beyond narratives of conflict as aberration, the analysis demonstrates how these texts theorize the necropolitical logics governing postcolonial existence, revealing war and so-called peace as entangled conditions on a single continuum of systemic violence. Framed by Mbembe’s necropolitics, Nixon’s slow violence, and critiques of developmentalism, the study contends that these novels expose liberal peace-building and security governance as often underpinned by structural and epistemic violence, where hegemonic development models can become instruments of dehumanization. Ultimately, the article contributes to peace and security scholarship by positioning this literary corpus as an embodied archive and theoretical intervention, one that insists true human flourishing requires a radical reimagining of both development and peace beyond their liberal conceptions.