Adekeye Adebajo

• University of Johannesburg

Chapter 2 argues that the United States policy towards Africa over the last six decades has reflected a history of “malign neglect”. During the Cold War, Washington pursued its global strategy of “anti-communism” in Africa, resulting in a proliferation of weapons to local proxies and millions of African deaths. After the end of the Cold War, despit...

This chapter, by Nigerian scholar Adekeye Adebajo, focuses on security in relations between Africa and the European Union (EU). He provides a historical account of the security role played by European powers in Africa, highlighting the differences in approach taken by Britain, France, and Germany, and assesses the EU’s evolving present-day military...

Debates on intervention and sovereignty since 1945 can be summarised as a tale of two cities, San Francisco and Bandung, and of two countries, Rwanda and Libya. All are symbolic of different phases of these debates. The UN was born in San Francisco in 1945 with very little substantive participation by Asian and African governments. The great powers...

In Greek mythology, Apollo—the god of prophesy, poetry, and music—gave the beautiful Cassandra the gift of foresight in a bid to seduce her.1 When Cassandra refused his advances, Apollo invoked a curse that her truthful prophesies would not be believed, and that she would be considered mad. The more contemporary tale that we recite here is not one...

This roundtable seeks to draw lessons for the themes of peacemaking, socio-economic justice, environmental protection, nuclear disarmament, and women's rights, based on the rich experiences of the 13 Nobel laureates of African descent. The first US president of African descent, Barack Obama, won the Nobel peace prize in 2008. This roundtable will p...

The essay traces the roots of R2P in African political thought—through individuals such as Kenya's Ali Mazrui, Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah, Tanzania's Salim Ahmed Salim, South Africa's Nelson Mandela and abo Mbeki, and Egypt's Boutros Boutros-Ghali— and considers the bid by West Africa's regional hegemon, Nigeria, to play a leadership role on the contine...

:Thabo Mbeki did not achieve the saintly superstardom of his predecessor, Nelson Mandela, but in his review of Mark Gevisser's A Legacy of Liberation, Adekeye Adebajo asserts that Mbeki was the most important African political leader of his generation. Alongside his weak stance on the AIDS crisis and the dictatorship of Robert Mugabe were diplomati...

In order to consolidate its strategic bilateral relations developed in Africa over the past 14 years, South Africa must choose five key ‘hubs’ (regional powers) in each of Africa's five sub-regions. In addition, South Africa should pick two additional ‘spokes’ (influential actors) in each sub-region. These 15 strategic partners can increase South A...

South Africa's history of political domination during apartheid and the tendency of its companies to dominate business development on the continent may undermine the country's aim of being an African powerhouse due to resentment in other African countries. The article argues that South Africa's global ambitions can only be achieved if it is a leade...

Introduction Since the early 1990s, West Africa has been an innovative laboratory for United Nations (UN) peacekeeping. In 1993, the UN deployed military observers in Liberia, alongside a regional organisation – the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) Ceasefire Monitoring Group (ECOMOG) – for the first time in its history. The UN als...

In the post-Cold War era, United Nations (UN) débâcles in Somalia (1993) and Rwanda (1994) led to powerful Western actors abandoning Africa to its own fate. The neglect of the continent forced regional actors like the Organization of African Unity (OAU) - now the African Union; the Southern African Development Community (SADC); the Economic Communi...

This essay investigates U.S. policy toward Africa and highlights the role that African Americans have played in influencing this policy. It is inspired by the need for an urgent dialogue between Africans and African Americans on U.S. policy toward the continent. It begins by briefly assessing the ignominious roots of Africa's relationship with Amer...

This essay is a comparative investigation into two cases, in Liberia and Somalia, of ‘hegemonic peacekeeping’. It explains the motives of the two lead states - Nigeria and the United States-for their military interventions. The essay assesses the interests of the allies of both countries in accepting their leadership, and highlights some of the pol...

This essay is an investigation of the United States’ policy toward Africa, and Africa’s place in America’s “war on terrorism.” In the firm belief that one cannot understand current U.S. policy toward Africa without providing a historical context, the essay starts by briefly assessing the destructive effects of American policies on Africa during the...

Among all of Africa's troubled regions, West Africa has gone the furthest toward establishing a security mechanism to manage its own conflicts. The ECOMOG intervention in Liberia in 1990-1997 was the first by a subregional African organization relying principally on its own personnel, money, and military material; and ECOMOG's 1998 intervention in...

SAIS Review 17.2 (1997) 153-164 During his trip to Africa in October 1996, former US Secretary of State Warren Christopher traversed the continent as a traveling salesman in a bid to promote the idea of a 10,000-strong African Crisis Response Force (ACRF). This Clinton-Christopher proposal was largely motivated by the recognition that domestic poli...

militarily in African countries after debacles in Somalia and Rwanda in the 1990s led many observers to question whether South Africa and Nigeria - which was at that time leading a peacekeeping mission in Liberia under the auspices of the ECOWAS Ceasefire Monitoring Group (ECOMOG) - could fill this security vacuum. Though South Africa, accounting f...

With the demise of West Africa's most ruthless warlords, there are great expectations that a Pax West Africana may finally be established in one of the world's most volatile and unstable subregions. Faced with a rebellion that was threatening to topple his regime, Charles Taylor unexpectedly ceded power in Liberia and went into exile in Nigeria in...

This article assesses West Africa's security complex through six interrelated developments that currently define the subregion's security and governance landscape. First, the demise of the subregion's warlords; second, the re-emergence of military coups as a form of regime change and the "civilianization" of military regimes through often dubious p...