Over the past fifty years of independence in Africa and in the Middle East, no event has captured the minds and imaginations of activists, scholars, policymakers, and challenged the conscience of the global community like violence and its related outcomes, including poverty. The 20th century was a period in human history replete with violence on a never-before seen scale. Violence continue to dominate coverage on political events unfolding in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon. A survey of events on the African continent likewise shows political upheavals, civil wars, and revolutionary movements competing for state power in South Sudan, Sudan, Nigeria, Central Africa Republic, Cameroun, Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia, Egypt, Libya. Alongside inter-state violence, one increasingly find intra-state violence that takes the form of civil war, and trans-regional conflicts where multiple actors including state, regional, international and non-state actors are all major stakeholders competing for power. With inter-state conflict greatly reduced, intra-state conflict, trans-regional conflicts, and conflict that pits non-state actors against state actors are on the rise in both Africa and the Middle East. In this article I analyze the “Culture Talk” or the “culturalist approach” framework as a way of making sense of non-revolutionary and non-traditional violence and its implications. In this article I attempt to think through existing debates on violence, focusing on postcolonial violence. In the first section I discuss the mainstream approach to making sense of violence by relying on culture as a marker and tool for determining one's politics. This is an intellectual approach that argues that culture is the most reliable clue to people's politics and therefore interprets political violence as a product of a people's culture. In the second section, I analyze violence and discuss the main proponents of culturalist approach to the study of violence: Samuel Huntington and Bernard Lewis and their contribution to Cultural Talk. In the third section, I analyze the application of Culture Talk to postcolonial violence
