Adaptive Resilience

What if the security of your country behaved less like a rigid machine and more like a living organism—constantly adapting, learning, and evolving? In Complex Adaptive Systems, Resilience and Security in Cameroon, Manu Lekunze makes this very argument. He contends that to understand modern security—especially in the African context—we must see it as a complex adaptive system rather than a linear machine that can be simply fixed or controlled. In this view, Cameroon’s intertwined political, social, and military systems form a dynamic web where institutions evolve through constant adaptation and feedback, much like ecosystems and neural networks do in nature.

Lekunze argues that the old ways of studying security—rooted in what he calls “the Newtonian paradigm,” where outcomes follow predictable cause-and-effect logic—fail to explain why fragile or ‘failed’ states like Cameroon persist despite multiple crises. He proposes complexity science as a new lens, suggesting that security systems act less like linear mechanisms and more like webs of interacting agents that self-adjust in the face of tension and disruption. This approach reframes Africa’s ‘fragile states’ not as failures, but as resilient adaptive organisms that continuously reorganize to absorb shocks.

Security Beyond Linear Thinking

The author opens by criticizing the prevalent “linear and additive” mindset of policy analysts and international actors, particularly the Western liberal interventions that still dominate twenty-first century state-building models. These models, he argues, view insecurity as a solvable equation—input funds, training, and institutions, get peace. Cameroon’s experience shows otherwise. Despite terrorism threats, political stagnation, and separatist unrest, the state resists collapse. Instead of focusing on fragility or failure, Lekunze insists we look at resilience as the product of complexity—a nation’s capacity to maintain functionality even under perpetual stress.

By applying complexity science concepts like emergence, non-linearity, feedback loops, and self-organization, Lekunze reframes how security operates. He likens computational modeling in this field to how biology uses microscopes or astronomy uses telescopes—tools that reveal unseen complexities. The ultimate goal, he writes, is to understand not only how Cameroon's networks operate, but how policies can strengthen their resilience without damaging their adaptive capacities.

The Case of Cameroon as a Living System

Cameroon provides the perfect case study because it represents a paradox: politically stagnant yet stable, ethnically diverse but unified, and continually engulfed in crises that never quite destroy it. Situated in Central Africa with deep colonial legacies (German, French, and British), Cameroon’s security environment combines European bureaucratic institutions, indigenous political structures, and religious influences into a dense hybrid network. This creates redundancy and adaptability—a recipe for resilience.

From the authoritarian presidency of Paul Biya to the local chiefs, gendarmes, priests, and vigilantes guarding cocoa farms, every actor is part of an overlapping lattice of authority. Lekunze’s interviews with soldiers, chiefs, magistrates, and ordinary citizens reveal that the flow of information, loyalty, and coercion operates less as a hierarchy and more as “boxes within boxes”—each capable of adapting independently yet intertwined in a shared function of preserving internal order. In this sense, Cameroon’s security system mimics an organism with distributed intelligence and self-corrective mechanisms.

From Fragility to Resilience Thinking

Lekunze positions his work within a larger intellectual movement he calls the “resilience turn” in international relations—a shift from trying to eradicate disorder to learning to live with vulnerability. Here, security is not the absence of threats but the ability to absorb, adapt, and reorganize when they occur. This has huge implications for how you think about governance: instead of aiming to fix or control every crisis, you design institutions capable of learning and self-adjusting in real time. Cameroon’s dense web of actors—both formal (the army, police, judiciary) and informal (chiefs, religious leaders, vigilantes, civil groups)—demonstrates this adaptive power in practice.

Why This Matters to You

If you manage teams, lead communities, or design policies, Lekunze’s insights suggest a crucial lesson: resilience emerges when systems are allowed to evolve instead of being tightly controlled. This means nurturing local intelligence, redundancy, and feedback. Like Cameroon’s overlapping security actors, your own organization benefits when multiple voices, flexible roles, and adaptive learning co-exist. Whether in governance, technology, or education, complex systems thrive when they are trusted to self-organize rather than commanded to conform.

As Lekunze concludes, Cameroon’s enduring stability may look like stagnation from the outside, but from within, it’s the delicate choreography of a complex adaptive system that refuses to break, instead learning—sometimes painfully—how to bend. In a world of increasing volatility, his book offers a provocative, deeply analytical model for seeing resilience not as accidental but as the product of complexity itself.

Lekunze begins his empirical journey by peeling back Cameroon’s layered colonial heritage to show how its modern security logic was born in coercion and adaptation. Modern-day policing, intelligence, and even the language of unity—“one Cameroon, united and indivisible”—echo structures first crafted under German rule, then hardened by the French and British. This legacy, he argues, is key to understanding Cameroon’s contemporary security resilience—and its authoritarian tendencies.

From Kamerun to the Republic: A Century of Military Hierarchy

When Germany annexed Kamerun in 1884, it imposed rule by armed force rather than negotiation. Local chiefs who resisted were overthrown or co-opted into indirect rule. The British and French continued this policy, dividing the territory and militarizing administration. Lekunze shows how “military governance” shaped both colonial and post-independence Cameroon—by enforcing foreign order over indigenous preferences. Chiefs became intermediaries; compliance was rewarded, dissent punished. Modern-day prefects, governors, and even police chains of command trace back to this structure.

Gradualism vs. Upcism: The French Legacy of Control

During the 1950s independence struggle, two competing visions emerged. The Union des Populations Camerounaises (UPC) demanded immediate and total independence, advocating for reunification of territories and full sovereignty. The French, terrified of losing control of Central Africa, imposed “gradualism”—a slow independence with French backing, military agreements, and the CFA currency. Lekunze emphasizes that this compromise embedded neo-colonial dependence into Cameroon's genetic code. The war against UPC insurgents from 1956 to 1971 left behind a “culture of surveillance and brutality” that persists in today’s security apparatus.

Postcolonial Reproduction of Fear

From President Ahmadou Ahidjo to Paul Biya, the post-independence state kept France’s blueprint intact. The military structure—trained by French officers from Algeria and Indochina—was designed less to protect citizens and more to “eliminate subversion.” Torture, arbitrary arrest, and mass intimidation became normalized governance tools (as documented by Albert Mukong, a dissident jailed by Ahidjo). Lekunze presents vivid continuities: villages burned during colonial pacification mirror tactics seen today in Anglophone areas. Resilience, in this view, means not reform but endurance through coercion.

The Colonial Echo in Modern Stability

Why has Cameroon remained relatively peaceful compared to its neighbors? Lekunze’s answer is unsettling: because fear and hierarchy still function as the coordinating fabric of governance. The same “covert French sovereignty” that stabilized Francophone Africa also made domestic rebellion costly. Customary chiefs depend on state recognition; prefects rely on presidential decrees; and citizens learn early that survival depends on silence. The result: resilience without liberty. This colonial DNA created a self-reinforcing system—stable, yes, but slow to evolve.

(For comparison, similar dynamics exist in Postcolonial State Formation in Africa by Crawford Young, where colonial administrative legacies remain the skeletons of postcolonial bureaucracy.)

Across African studies, Cameroon is often labeled ‘fragile’ or ‘failing.’ Lekunze dismantles this cliché. Using complexity science, he reframes fragility as a misunderstanding of systemic resilience. A state’s endurance, he argues, depends not on the absence of problems but on its ability to metabolize them. “The question,” Lekunze writes, “is not whether a state is fragile or stable, but how it copes.”

Complex Systems Theory as Security Lens

In nature, ecosystems thrive through feedback loops and redundancy. Cameroon’s political ecology works similarly. Each level—from family heads and village chiefs to gendarmes and governors—operates semi-independently yet interacts with others through implicit rules. A failure in one part doesn’t destroy the system because others compensate. This distributed capability makes Cameroon resilient to shocks such as economic crises or insurgencies.

Redundancy: The Power of Surplus Capacity

Lekunze highlights “redundant capacity,” where multiple institutions perform overlapping roles—what Western analysts might call inefficiency actually ensures survival. When local police collapse under pressure, customary vigilantes appear. When state courts stall, tribal councils provide justice. During the Boko Haram insurgency, local “comités de vigilance” mobilized faster than formal armies. This redundancy, though messy, diffuses risk and absorbs disorder.

Nonlinearity: Small Triggers, Big Effects

In Cameroon, small factors—like a village rumor, a chief’s defection, or an internet shutdown—can reshape national politics. Lekunze invokes the “butterfly effect”: minor shocks ripple through networks in unpredictable ways. Yet the same principle enables resilience. The system’s dense web of feedback ensures no single failure cascades system-wide. Its inherent nonlinearity prevents total collapse—Cameroon may bend, but it rarely breaks.

The Politics of Resilience

Cameroon’s leaders exploit these dynamics. Paul Biya’s regime sustains stability through what Lekunze calls “conflict-inhibiting cybernetics”—a feedback architecture that dampens threats faster than they escalate. Security, then, is systemic self-regulation, not moral virtue. It’s uncomfortable but true: Cameroon’s resilience is both a defense mechanism and a political strategy for perpetuating power. (In contrast, see David Chandler’s Resilience: The Governance of Complexity for a critical take on how governments co-opt resilience thinking.)

Central to Lekunze’s analysis is his mapping of Cameroon’s diverse security actors. Instead of one monolithic government, security emerges from an intricate web: chiefs, police, military units, religious leaders, vigilante groups, NGOs, and even family heads. Each operates within overlapping jurisdictions, forming what the book calls a ‘boxes within boxes’ hierarchy—decentralized yet interconnected.

The Primary System: Everyday Security

At the ground level, most Cameroonians experience security through family heads, quarter chiefs, or traditional vigilantes, not the army or police. These customary systems prevent disputes, enforce moral codes, and resolve conflict through conciliation rather than punishment. Lekunze notes that family heads act as patriarchal judges; quarter heads monitor disputes; and chiefs operate semi-formal courts aligned with local beliefs. Together, they form the “primary system” of vernacular security—community-based, moral, accessible.

Modern State Actors: The Intervention Layer

Above the primary level lie formal institutions—the police, gendarmerie, judiciary, army, and the presidency. These constitute secondary and regulatory systems that intervene when crises exceed local capacity. Their design mirrors colonial militarization: prefects command police forces, governors control military zones, and ultimately the president directs security priorities. Lekunze’s interviews show how officials understand their main duty not as protecting citizens, but maintaining ordre public—state stability above individual safety.

Networks of Cooperation and Control

Despite authoritarian overtones, cooperation thrives. Chiefs relay police summonses, pastors mediate disputes, and even NGOs complement surveillance through social programs. Information flows upward through ritualized meetings and downward through informal orders. This “boxes-in-boxes” system creates flexibility: no part knows everything, yet together they respond seamlessly to threats.

The takeaway? Cameroon's security doesn’t depend on efficiency—it depends on density. Its overlapping networks of loyalty and hierarchy make total collapse unlikely, even if corruption and repression persist.

For more than half a century, Cameroon has faced coups, insurgencies, secessionist wars, and terrorist attacks, yet it endures. Lekunze’s detailed chronology of crises—from the 1984 coup attempt and 1990s democratization protests to the Boko Haram conflict and ongoing Anglophone rebellion—illustrates how a system learns to survive its own disasters.

Absorbing Shocks without Collapsing

Each crisis tested Cameroon’s adaptive capacity. When the UPC insurgency ended, repression turned into political order. When economic collapse sparked food riots in 2008, the army and elite police units (GMI, BIR, ESIR) responded with brute force but kept the state intact. During Boko Haram’s ravaging of the north, local vigilantes filled gaps while military taskforces stabilized borders. Lekunze calls this redundant resilience—the ability to reconfigure old institutions to meet new shocks, even at moral cost.

Adaptation in the Digital Era

New threats, however, challenge this old machinery. The “Anglophone crisis” disrupted traditional hierarchies: chiefs fled villages, young militants organized online, and diaspora activists broadcast atrocities globally. Lekunze observes that the state’s cybernetic controls—fear, censorship, bureaucracy—struggle against digital connectivity. The government resorted to blunt tools like internet shutdowns, a sign that political adaptation is lagging behind technological change.

Resilience as Both Gift and Curse

Survival, Lekunze warns, can become self-trapping. Cameroon’s stability masks stagnation. The same institutions that prevent collapse also prevent evolution. “Resilience,” he writes, “has become a philosophy of endurance rather than transformation.” Still, this stubborn durability has kept Cameroon’s borders intact, its government continuous, and its identity cohesive against odds that splintered much of Central Africa.

His lesson resonates globally: strong systems survive not by eliminating pressure, but by learning to live with it—though they risk calcifying into immovable orders if adaptation stops.

Lekunze concludes with a rallying call: security studies must embrace complexity science and computational modeling to design better policies. Just as biologists use microscopes to observe cellular processes, security scholars should use agent-based models (ABMs) to simulate how actors adapt to threats. Only then can we anticipate systemic tipping points before crises erupt.

Security as Emergence, Not Engineering

In complexity terms, security is emergent—it arises from interactions among agents rather than being imposed from above. Predictive control fails because systems like Cameroon’s are nonlinear: small interventions can trigger outsized effects. Computational modeling allows policymakers to test “what if” scenarios safely before implementing real-world reforms. This methodological innovation, Lekunze argues, could revolutionize African governance research.

From Theory to Application

Practical application is clear: simulate networks of chiefs, police, and citizens to locate “lever points” where small policy shifts yield big security payoffs. For example, increasing transparency in local governance might reduce corruption cascades or prevent uprisings. These tools turn resilience from vague metaphor into measurable science. (This aligns with scholars like John Holland and Stuart Kauffman who showed adaptive computation can reveal hidden system dynamics.)

A Call for Human-Centered Resilience

Lekunze ends with a humanist warning: resilience must be pursued as a means, not an end. Systems that only endure produce “the stability of the graveyard.” True security liberates people from fear and from want. Complexity science, when properly applied, can help leaders design adaptive systems that protect both states and citizens—without locking societies into endless cycles of survival.

For policymakers, his approach reframes the challenge: don’t build stronger walls; build smarter, self-organizing communities. The future of security, like the future of biology, will depend less on control and more on evolution.