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Africa in the United Nations.

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Africa, between 1960 and 1963, has been characterized as a divided continent, replete with rivalries among mutually antagonistic ideological blocs: the Brazzaville, Casablanca and Monrovia. The birth of the Organization of African Unity in 1963 is said to be the outcome of the settlement of their rivalries, making it a compromise between the radicals and conservatives, a cause of its under-performance. For this analysis to be valid, the political groupings must be demonstrated to have been distinct, both by interests and association. But membership of the Casablanca and Monrovia groups was neither deliberately restricted nor closed. To test the claim of separate identity and cohesiveness, their external behaviour was analysed via roll call voting in the United Nations General Assembly. Since agreement on African issues was usually taken for granted, the study chose Cold War issues and deployed Arend Lijphart’s Index of Agreement to determine their status as distinct groups. It was found that while there was significant agreement in the voting of members of the Brazzaville and Monrovia groups, agreement was weaker in that of the Casablanca group. But in an all-encompassing matrix, no distinct group is clearly visible, oppugning the assumption of their separateness. However, there was a stronger agreement between the voting patterns of members of the Casablanca group and the Soviet Union than between those of the Brazzaville and Monrovia (excluding the Brazzaville component) groups and the United States. In fact, their voting pattern showed less commitment to both powers.
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Writing about peace, security, and human survival is a very broad subject that involves such subjects as arms control and disarmament, promoting economic welfare of international community, social and human rights and justice, finding solution to food crisis, hunger and population problems, HIV/AIDS, refugees and disaster relief worldwide can be mind-boggling.2 Thus, I examine peace, security, and the strategic importance of Africa regarding the survival of the African peoples in the new international system, and Africa’s search for peace and security in the twenty-first century.3
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Two traditions of analysis exist with regard to the nature and expression of non-alignment in Nigeria’s foreign policy between 1960 and 1965. The tradition that dates from the early 1960s concludes that Nigeria’s foreign policy towards the Cold War was independent and non-aligned, and the post-war tradition is that Nigeria was ‘aligned’. Both traditions adduce as evidence for their opposing verdicts Nigeria’s voting pattern in the United Nations General Assembly between 1960 and 1965. Yet no thoroughgoing quantitative analysis of Nigeria’s pattern of voting in the General Assembly,both in individual and relative terms, has been undertaken. But can the same piece of evidence at the same time support such opposing conclusions? This paper responds to this problematic by first reviewing Nigeria’s policy toward the United Nations, and analysing the pattern of Nigeria’s voting on Cold War issues in the General Assembly. It employed the Lijphart method of computing Indices of Agreement of roll-call votes, taking account of abstentions, and arranged these indices in matrices anchored on groups of possibly caucusing states. The result is that the coincidence of Nigeria’s pattern of voting was minimal with those of the superpowers, but highly related to the voting patterns of the ‘radical’ African states and putative non-aligned states. This strengthens the conclusion that Nigeria acted as the administration said it would: independent and not routinely identifying with either of the superpowers.
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On Tuesday 22 January, 1963, the First Secretary of State and Minister in charge of the Central Africa Office, R.A. Butler, met with the Southern Rhodesia Cabinet in Salisbury. Butler notified the Cabinet that he was visiting the Central African Federation in order to “gauge for himself” the situation. Southern Rhodesia, he remarked, was “an issue unjustifiably pursued at the United Nations” and countering this negative international opinion “was providing the British Government with a difficult, tedious and unwanted task”.
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Cognitive mapping involves psychological assimilation or internalization of the relative location of given phenomena. In this investigation multidimensional scaling was utilized to recover cognitive maps of selected African countries, from African students, at Kent State University, Ohio, USA. MDS yielded results which suggest that the subjects seemed to differentiate these African countries on the basis of three criteria; first, reactionary status, secondly colonial grouping. The third dimension for state categorization however remains obscure, thus posing a challenge for future investigation.
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