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Jandila comments on Science Doesn't Trust Your Rationality - Less Wrong
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What I'm saying isn't which system produced less violence, it's that the framing in the article of things being mostly stable and peaceful and violence being an isolated, localized phenomenon is misleading at the very best -- the article says that by 1994 it had largely petered out.
Given what I've heard about daily life there from people who've actually, you know, lived there in the timeframe the article cites, including in the areas generally agreed to be the most stable, that seems like comparing a sucking chest wound from a bullet to a 6-inch long knife wound that's penetrated the abdominal cavity and saying that the latter is much better.
Well, it's not as immediately life-threatening, sure (in a merely-relative sense), but it's still intolerably bad, enough that trumpeting it as a triumph of some social policy is just disingenuous.
Let us compare with Ivory coast democracy, where most of the coastal population was ethnically cleansed to the less desirable inland areas, or Nigerian democracy that led to the the Biafran genocide.
Black African governance is apt to be extremely bad under all systems. Anarchic Somalia not only does considerably better than the outstandingly dreadful Barre government, but arguably better than some governments beloved by the UN, the world bank, and western agencies.
Faced with Ivory coast democracy, it is reasonable to fight. Had the locals fought, and done OK, you would be getting similar reports about how dreadful things were in the Ivory coast.