The Impact of Colonial Ethinic Partitioning on Conflict and Nation-building in Africa

The European powers that divided Africa into formal colonies in the late nineteenth century had very little knowledge of the ethnic layout of the continent at the time. This resulted in the partitioning of many African ethnic groups across the borders of several countries, as well as the grouping of disparate ethncities within a single country. This partitioning has been empirically associated with increased political violence, ethnic discrimination, and military interventions from neighbouring countries. I propose a theoretical model which represents the ethnicities of the African continent on a hypergraph, with countries being represented as edges on the hypergraph. I aim to use the structural properties of the ethnic hypergraph to study how ethnic partitioning might increase the prevalence of poor outcomes in modern African states such as increased ethnic conflict and repression.