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Ethnicity, Freedoms and Sociopolitical Conflicts in Sub-Saharan Africa: The Role of Social Media
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DOI：10.1007/s13132-026-03397-6.png)
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Abstract
En 中文
Our objective is to show that policies for ethnic, religious inclusion and for promotion of individual freedoms must be combined with strategies for regulating ICT, essential pillars of the Knowledge Economy Index, particularly the Social Media, for greater effectiveness on the management of sociopolitical instabilities in SSA. In providing empirical evidence, we use MO Ibrahim Foundation (2023) database, the World Bank (2021) database (WDI) and the Statcounter Global Statistics database (1999–2023) and we adopt the GMM estimation system for 21 Sub-Saharan African countries for the period 2012 to 2021. The empirical results confirm, first, particularly for countries with low fragmentation, that socio-institutional factors are essential to explain instabilities. For countries with high fragmentation, the results are only confirmed for countries with little heterogeneity. Second, the introduction of ICT-SM development indicators improves the quality of the regression and highlights the direct and indirect effects of SM on the occurrence of conflicts in SSA. Indeed, Youtube has positive and significant direct effects on instabilities. Additionally, Yahoo!Buzz and Google + exert positive and significant interactive effects on socio-institutional factors unlike Facebook with significant negative interactions. Third, it is important to highlight the significant positive effects with strong impacts of previous crises on the occurrence of crises. It follows that, for greater effectiveness in the prevention and management of instabilities in SSA, policies of inclusion and promotion of freedoms must be combined with regulation of freedoms of expression on the Internet with the aim of reducing the devastating effects of YouTube channels.
Keywords:
Ethnicity
Freedoms
Conflicts
ICT-SM
Sub-Saharan Africa
Dynamic Panel Data
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