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‘Home-Made African Peacekeeping Initiatives’
Abstract
The end of the Cold War altered the perspective of conflict resolution globally. One such alteration is the transformed nature of the tasks performed by the military in operations designed to control violent conflicts. Some of the most significant changes have occurred in Africa, where peacekeeping has escalated beyond traditionally accepted principle to include enforcement in a bid to control destructive internal conflicts (e.g., Liberia and Somalia). This article argues that the decline in Africa's strategic importance has compelled Africans to take greater responsibility for the resolution of conflicts in their region, and to employ more severe strategies in dealing with these conflicts. It also analyzes Africa's major peacekeeping operations, and contrasts the traditional peacekeeping strategy employed by the OAU force in Chad with the more severe strategy employed by ECOWAS in Liberia.
... In some cases, hardships can be exacerbated by perceptions of mistreatment. In an in-depth investigation of Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group (ECOMOG) missions, Olonisakin (2000) details numerous problems faced by peacekeepers. These problems, perhaps unsurprisingly, have been argued to lead to mutinies. ...
... Importantly, these tasks allowed soldiers-often from very poor backgrounds-to receive dramatically increased wages that would allow them to buy homes, invest, and start businesses (Banini, Powell, and Yelpke 2020). These are opportunities they otherwise would have lacked (Erskine 1989;Olonisakin 1997;Clune 2016). Ghana's peacekeeping experience, however, has not been without controversy. ...
Research on host-country effects of peacekeeping deployments has highlighted destabilizing consequences for contributing states, suggesting that deployments can increase the willingness and ability of soldiers to mutiny or attempt coups. Yet others expect that peacekeeping contributions may bring a variety of benefits, including improved civilian control of the armed forces. We reconcile these conflicting assessments in two ways. First, we identify important differences across peacekeeping organizations. Missions undertaken by the United Nations (UN) are generally better funded and equipped, invoke selection criteria that should produce fewer grievances than missions operated by regional organizations, and may be more risk averse. The benefits or hazards of peacekeeping can thus vary substantially, leading to different consequences for organizations. Second, the pros and cons of peacekeeping can incentivize mutinies and coups differently. When grievances are present, financial incentives of peacekeeping may prompt soldiers to prefer mutiny over coups to avoid being disqualified from future participation. We assess these expectations for African states’ participation in UN and non-UN peacekeeping operations from 1990 to 2011. We find no evidence that UN peacekeeping deployments increase mutiny risk, while non-UN deployments have a positive effect on the occurrence of mutiny. These findings remain robust across a large number of model specifications.
... The organisation as well as its member states are steadily proceeding with creating the requisite capabilities for such missions (e.g. through training), which may well prove very demanding, both in manpower and logistical terms (Furley & May, eds. 1998;Olonisakin 1997;Berman & Sams 2000, pp. 151-192). ...
This research focuses on the place of soldiers’ families and family life while on deployment, using the case of Ghana’s regular deployments to international peacekeeping missions. We advance the concept of a “military surrogate” to explain the ways in which military hierarchy temporarily take on family roles when a soldier is deployed. This involves intervening in issues related to military spouses, troublesome children, and resolving financial matters. We argue that filling the role as a “surrogate” family member is used by the command both as a way to support deployed soldiers but also as a way to shape behaviors. This phenomenon demonstrates ways that discipline and conformity to military norms work through families and the openings that are left during deployments. We also highlight the ways this process shapes peer bonding, often building peer-to-peer relationships as an attempt to prevent involvement by senior command in their family affairs.
This commentary introduces the issue that celebrates Armed Forces & Society ( AF&S) at 50. In 1974, during the Cold War, Morris Janowitz launched an international and interdisciplinary journal that helped define a new scholarly field of study. We show how the articles of AF&S reflect the Janowitz’s goals by illustrating how journal content responded to the dynamic societal and security environments. We explore changes in the publishing environment through journal metrics and transformations in publishing technology. We then introduce the articles and commentary that fill the 50th anniversary issue. Two articles take an historical perspective focusing on our parent organization the Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society at 70 and description of AF&S articles across the 50 years. Finally, we provide an insightful commentary on 10 impactful articles that demonstrate ways AF&S contributed to our collective understanding of the intersection of military and society.
Since the 1952 military putsch in Egypt, Africa has witnessed 214 military coup attempts. Out of these, 104 were successful while 108 failed. Most of the coups were consequent upon the fragile colonial state and governing structures bequeathed on African countries. This chapter takes a historical excursion into the era of military coups and government in Africa since 1952. While colonialism and the nature of decolonisation prepared the context for political instability, post-independent African states were victims of internal socio-political rivalries among the political and military elites. This development, fuelled by the attitudinal disposition of the elites to state power, has remained a defining feature of African governance. The chapter submits that while successive military regimes failed to correct the mistakes of their predecessors, the civilian regimes that succeeded military autocracy continued to falter in the promotion of good governance.
Scholarly debates on civil–military relations often focus on how the military impacts society. Adding to the vast literature of civil–military relations, this article examines how socio-cultural practices and societal developments in the host society affect the military. Based on long-term ethnographic engagement with the Ghana Armed Forces, the piece presents empirical observations of how culturally informed practices, such as begging via proxies ( djuan toa), infiltrate the Ghanaian military barracks and affect the institutions’ functioning. The article illustrates how two additional elements, skewed recruitment practices and the politicisation of the rank and file, are used as tools by political factions, such as Ghana’s two most prominent parties (the New Patriotic Party and National Democratic Congress), seeking to gain control over the Ghanaian military. The article analyses how these approaches contribute to undermining the armed forces’ discipline and military professionalism and consequently affect the military institution as a whole.
This paper contributes to debates on the relationship between peacebuilding and statebuilding with its analysis of post-independence Sierra Leone. It considers the extent to which peacebuilding has returned Sierra Leonean society to post-independence statebuilding conversations and how the issues that have emanated from such conversations have interacted with settlement and post-settlement arrangements. This paper analyses original data from focus group discussions and interviews in fieldwork from January 2016. It finds that the situation in Sierra Leone heralded opportunities for peacebuilding processes to engage concerns that have been linked with historical statebuilding conversations. Yet formal statebuilding processes, which were particularly focused on liberal institution building in the post-conflict context, were not sufficiently attentive to their antecedents. Nonetheless there are suggestions of some engagement with extant statebuilding conversations particularly in relation to how ethnicity continues to colour the statebuilding project, the significance of intergroup dynamics across intergenerational exchanges and gender and the challenges of socio-economic exclusion.
African political elites have been forthcoming with military support for United Nations peacekeeping missions, contributing substantially to these missions’ workforce. Despite their contribution, most studies on peacekeeping omit the African soldier’s voice on his experiences of the African war theatre. This article features Ghanaian soldiers’ narratives based on their peacekeeping deployments and illuminates how Ghanaian peacekeepers connect their experiences to their home society. In this contribution, I illustrate how Ghanaian soldiers’ narratives about peacekeeping experiences are framed as deterring examples for their home society, thus potentially impacting their actions and behaviours. Based on long-term qualitative research embedded with the Ghanaian military, drawing from interviews and informal conversations with peacekeeping veterans and serving military operatives, it is argued that Ghanaian soldiers’ narratives of peacekeeping experiences and the collective processes through which these narratives gain currency in the barracks and beyond are informed by introspection in the post-peacekeeping deployment phase.
This handbook, compiled with the collaboration of many of the leading scholars of the sociology of the military, from different countries and continents, and representative of different currents of thought, ends up as a picture of the state of the art of the discipline fifteen years after the start of the new millennium. Beyond being a manual for consultation and study for those who pursue this discipline—or are approaching to it—the book constitutes a kind of summa of sociological thought on the military as it presents itself in the year 2015.
Between 1990 and 1997, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) was involved in peace-making and peace-keeping in Liberia, a West African country engulfed by internecine strife. For seven years the regional body tried to resolve the conflict, convening a number of peace meetings and brokering several peace accords, only to realise that the armed factions would renege on them. The UN and the OAU were brought in to provide legitimacy, but that was not sufficient to bring the war to an immediate end. It was not until the factions became exhausted militarily, coupled with internal and external pressures, that they finally agreed to resolve the crisis through a democratic process. By this time, the war had cost 250 000 lives out of a total of 2.5 million people, the death of more than thousand peace-keepers, and the destruction of the national infrastructure and the fragile economy. The general and presidential elections of 19 July 1997 resulted in a landslide victory for Charles Taylor, a leader of one of the main warring factions, and his National Patriotic Party (NPP). This effectively marked ‘the end’ of the war.
Between 1990 and 1997, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) was involved in peace-making and peace-keeping in Liberia, a West African country engulfed by internecine strife. For seven years the regional body tried to resolve the conflict, convening a number of peace meetings and brokering several peace accords, only to realise that the armed factions would renege on them. The UN and the OAU were brought in to provide legitimacy, but that was not sufficient to bring the war to an immediate end. It was not until the factions became exhausted militarily, coupled with internal and external pressures, that they finally agreed to resolve the crisis through a democratic process. By this time, the war had cost 250 000 lives out of a total of 2.5 million people, the death of more than thousand peace-keepers, and the destruction of the national infrastructure and the fragile economy. The general and presidential elections of 19 July 1997 resulted in a landslide victory for Charles Taylor, a leader of one of the main warring factions, and his National Patriotic Party (NPP). This effectively marked ‘the end’ of the war.
This study contends that an analysis of the nexus between leadership and security offers useful insights into explaining conflict by stating that the conceptualisation of these argots, especially through the definition of leadership as a process, helps to explain and address Nigeria’s security challenges. By arguing that leaders’ ability to establish mutuality with their followers in any situation and set collectively-generated means for attaining these set goals for societal security, the study shows how such a relationship creates a secured state. This is not the case in Nigeria, where leaders’ security decisions are influenced by external actors rather than by their followers. By showing that the Nigerian ruling elite’s security agendas intersect with dominant global notions of security while neglecting genuine security interests of ordinary Nigerians, the study contextualises the complex global and local security interests in Nigeria. The lack of an intersection at home, however, has contributed to the emergence of extremists such as the Boko Haram sect, as well as the escalation of the acts of violence they perpetrate. As national insecurities become complex and intractable, ‘elegant’ or unilinear solutions – such as a military approach – lack the capacity to address these problems.
This chapter seeks to determine how effective African regional organizations have been in conducting peacekeeping1 and to analyze their efforts to improve their capabilities to manage and resolve conflicts. To do this, the first section reviews the peacekeeping missions that African regional organizations have undertaken and highlights the political, military, and financial constraints from which they have suffered.2 The second section describes and assesses various peace and security mechanisms that African regional organizations are establishing as well as other measures they are taking to enhance their preparedness. Based on this overview, the concluding section then draws some lessons for both regional organizations and UN efforts in the future.
The increased burden placed upon the UN Security Council in the post-Cold War era in respect of its discharge of its primary
responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security has fuelled calls for the greater use of regional arrangements
as agents of the Council, to relieve its burden. However, the various agendas and capabilities of different arrangements make
it difficult to adopt a uniform template of the role which regional arrangements can play as conductors of peace support operations
authorised by the Security Council. This article attempts to provide a framework against which the potential role of different
arrangements as viable agents to which the Security Council can entrust military enforcement operations, before going on to
assess how selected African and European organisations fare against this framework. It will be demonstrated that when assessed
against this framework, the organisations selected for comparison are remarkably similar.
The recently established African Union mandates the creation of an African Standby Force. This policy paper reviews the current engagement by other Western nations with the new African Union and its Peace and Security Council to address challenges to security in Africa through the African Standby Force, its accompanying early warning system, and civil society engagement. Building on Canada's long‐standing expertise in peacekeeping and peace building, the report presents foreign and defence policy options that can put Canada in a better position to help build the indigenous capacity of Africa to address security issues, as well as to carve out a distinctly Canadian approach to peace and security on the continent. This paper makes a total of 35 specific recommendations to the Government of Canada with specific reference to the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, the Canadian International Development Agency, and the Department of National Defence and Canadian Forces on the roles Canada can play in supporting the AU's African Standby Force.
External support is essential to the development of the African Standby Force (ASF), an African-led mechanism for crisis management and peace consolidation in Africa. This research paper examines external support to the ASF by several bilateral and multinational contributors, assessing its strengths and limits, and attempts to measure the significance of the support to the aspired outcome.
The starting point of the study is an analysis of the fast-evolving ASF project, which has gone through many phases of definition and redefinition since it was conceived in the late 1990s. The ASF, it is argued, is a ‘moving target’, due to the inability of African stakeholders to settle on a clear concept, setting themselves ever more ambitious goals at every stage. Partners simultaneously suffer from, and contribute to this state of affairs. Whilst coordination efforts are undertaken, partners' support too often still responds to national (for bilateral donors) or institutional interests (for multilateral ones), each partner using the leeway created by the conceptual ambiguities of the ASF to press its own priorities. Given the overwhelming role of partners in the conceptual maturation of the ASF, and the impact of their funding decisions, this is turn exacerbates the confusion about the true direction of its development. Said differently, the ASF is burdened by the lack of political, conceptual, and financial ownership on the side of the recipients, who are also its main stakeholders. The result is at best an ambiguous partnership, and at worst a waste of human resources, financial means and political capital.
Attempting to differentiate between degrees of ‘ownership’, the study concludes that it is only if AU member states make a conscious effort to increase their political, conceptual and especially, financial, stake in the ASF that they will credibly demonstrate that it is not an entirely foreign-mastered project, but a real ‘African solution to African problems’.
Purpose This study describes peacekeeping issues found in the journal of Armed Forces & Society. Peacekeeping is an important aspect of civil-military relations because it attempts to normalize the relationship between society and the armed forces of a nation. As the premier journal on civil-military relations Armed Forces & Society should cover topics dealing with peacekeeping. Peacekeeping operations are undertaken to repair the negative relationship between a society and its armed forces. The journal has proven to be the benchmark in discussing civil-military relations and therefore should incorporate content on peacekeeping. The peacekeeping issues are organized using a taxonomy found in Report of the Panel on United Nations Peacekeeping Operations. This study breaks down peacekeeping operations into four categories and describes the level of discussion Armed Forces & Society gives to each category. This study illustrates how the journal Armed Forces & Society, contributes to the scholarly literature of peacekeeping. Methodology Peacekeeping is reduced to four major categories. Categories used in the content analysis include: internal characteristics, operational characteristics, authorization characteristics and the political and military context of a peacekeeping operation. The categories of peacekeeping operations are modeled on a framework derived from the United Nations' Report of the Panel on United Nations Peacekeeping Operations produced in 2000. A content analysis of articles found in the journal Armed Forces & Society from the first issue in 1974 to the October 2009 issue is used to describe the peacekeeping content. Results This study measures and describes the frequency of discussion by Armed Forces & Society concerning peacekeeping operations. Peacekeeping categories and sub-categories are ranked to show the level of contribution made to the peacekeeping literature. Peacekeeping issues such as personnel, personnel behavior and training are discussed at length and contribute greatly to the peacekeeping discussion. Some areas of peacekeeping, such as the behavior of 3rd party actors, Security Council Mandates and the command and control of an operation are partially represented. After presenting the findings of this study recommendations are made to assist future scholars and journal leadership in contributing to the peacekeeping literature.
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