This book 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.

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

Gegout's book offers a sharp rebuke to those who believe that altruism is the guiding principle of Western intervention in Africa.

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. Obert Hodzi is Visiting Researcher at the African Studies Center, Boston University, USA, and Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Helsinki, Finland.

The Impact of Foreign Interventions on Democracy and Human Rights provides holistic studies exploring the relationship between military and economic interventions and the policies, methods, intentions, and consequences of the various American, French, and Chinese interventions in the case studies they present.

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.

Strong nation-states often assume that they can use their military might to intervene in civil wars and otherwise reshape the domestic political order of weaker states. Often, however, as recent history demonstrates, foreign military interventions end up becoming protracted conflicts. This was the case, for example, for the United States in Vietnam, the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, Syria in Lebanon, Israel in Lebanon, South Africa and Cuba in Angola, and India in Sri Lanka. Some of these cases resulted in major setbacks; in others, a greater degree of success was achieved. But in all six, the interventions turned out to be long, complicated, and costly undertakings with far-reaching repercussions. Foreign Military Intervention: The Dynamics of Protracted Conflict brings together prominent scholars in an ambitious and innovative comparative study. The six case studies noted above constitute a diverse set, involving superpowers and regional powers, democracies and non-democracies, neighboring states and distant states, and incumbent regimes and insurgent movements. The book examines both the similarities and the differences among these cases, identifying key patterns and gaining insights both about the individual cases themselves and the dynamics of foreign military intervention in general. Each case study is structured according to three analytical stages of intervention--getting in, staying in, and getting out--and is focused through three levels of analysis: the international system, the domestic context of the intervening state, and the domestic context of the target state. Three additional chapters provide cross-case comparisons along each of the analytic stages, adding depth and richness to the study. A concluding chapter by the editors provides additional perspective on foreign military interventions, integrating major arguments and presenting key theoretical as well as policy-oriented findings. While all six cases are drawn from the Cold War era, the issues raised and dilemmas posed never have been strictly tied to any particular system structure. Indeed, they preceded the Cold War and, as already evident amidst the new and widespread domestic instability of the post-Cold War world, will postdate it. Foreign Military Intervention: The Dynamics of Protracted Conflict thus is a timely, important study of value and relevance both to scholars and policymakers dealing with the challenges of contemporary world politics.