Foreign Intervention In Africa

This book chronicles foreign political and military interventions in Africa from 1956 to 2010, helping readers understand the historical roots of Africa's problems.

Chronicles foreign political and military interventions in Africa from 1956 to 2010, helping readers understand the historical roots of Africa's problems.

In Foreign Intervention in Africa after the Cold War—interdisciplinary in approach and intended for nonspecialists—Elizabeth Schmidt provides a new framework for thinking about foreign political and military intervention in Africa, its purposes, and its consequences. She focuses on the quarter century following the Cold War (1991–2017), when neighboring states and subregional, regional, and global organizations and networks joined extracontinental powers in support of diverse forces in the war-making and peace-building processes. During this period, two rationales were used to justify intervention: a response to instability, with the corollary of responsibility to protect, and the war on terror. Often overlooked in discussions of poverty and violence in Africa is the fact that many of the challenges facing the continent today are rooted in colonial political and economic practices, in Cold War alliances, and in attempts by outsiders to influence African political and economic systems during the decolonization and postindependence periods. Although conflicts in Africa emerged from local issues, external political and military interventions altered their dynamics and rendered them more lethal. Foreign Intervention in Africa after the Cold War counters oversimplification and distortions and offers a new continentwide perspective, illuminated by trenchant case studies.

What causes local conflict in Africa and the rest of the Third World? What role, if any, can the U.S. play in helping to resolve these conflicts, and when is the time ripe for a response by an external power? This study, written by an internationally renowned Africanist and undertaken as part of the Africa Project of the Council on Foreign Relations, examines the causes and nature of African conflict and addresses the issue of how foreign powers can contribute productively to the management and resolution of such conflicts without resorting to the use of military force. Completely revised to incorporate up-to-the-minute information, the book focuses on four case studies of local conflict and external response--in the Western Sahara, the Horn of Africa, the Shaba province in Zaire, and Namibia--to assess various approaches to conflict management, and offers guidelines for identifying the critical moment for effective external response. The updated paper edition shows how the recommendations offered for conflict resoultion in the first edition have come to fruition, perhaps most dramatically with the recent withdrawal of Cuban troops from Angola. Zartman also evaluates U.S. policy toward Third World conflict and spells out a policy toward Africa and the Third World in general that is based on preemptive treatment rather than military intervention.

This book gives a compelling analysis and explanation of shifts in China’s non-intervention policy in Africa. Systematically connecting the neoclassical realist theoretical logic with an empirical analysis of China’s intervention in African civil wars, the volume highlights a methodical interlink between theoretical and empirical analysis that takes into consideration the changing status of rising powers in the global system and its effect on their intervention behaviour. Based on field research and expert interviews, it provides a rigorous analysis of China’s emergent intervention behaviour in some key African conflicts in Libya, South Sudan and Mali and broadens the study of external interventions in civil wars to include the intervention behaviour of non-Western rising powers.

Why Europe Intervenes in Africa analyses the underlying causes of all European decisions for and against military interventions in conflicts in African states since the late 1980s. It focuses on the main European actors who have deployed troops in Africa: France, the United Kingdom and the European Union. When conflict occurs in Africa, the response of European actors is generally inaction. This can be explained in several ways: the absence of strategic and economic interests, the unwillingness of European leaders to become involved in conflicts in former colonies of other European states, and sometimes the Eurocentric assumption that conflict in Africa is a normal event which does not require intervention. When European actors do decide to intervene, it is primarily for motives of security and prestige, and not primarily for economic or humanitarian reasons. The weight of past relations with Africa can also be a driver for European military intervention, but the impact of that past is changing. This book offers a theory of European intervention based mainly on realist and post-colonial approaches. It refutes the assumptions of liberals and constructivists who posit that states and organisations intervene primarily in order to respect the principle of the 'responsibility to protect'.

Examines twenty years of French military interventions in Chad and Hissène Habré's rise to power between 1960 and 1982.

An investigation of the origins of the Angolan civil war of 1975-76. By looking at the interaction between internal and external factors, it reveals the domestic roots of the conflict and the impact of foreign intervention on the civil war. The formative influence of colonialism and anti-colonialism on the emergence of Angolan rivalry since 1961 is described, and the externalization of that power struggle is analysed from a perspective of both international and domestic politics.