‘Africans will be biggest losers after letting foreign military into their continent’

          Africa has become a staging ground where foreign countries can show off their military capabilities against one another away from their country of origin at the expense of Africans, says African affairs expert Ayo Johnson.

Turkey is gearing to open its largest overseas military base in Somalia.
The United Arab Emirates are building a military base at the port of Berbera, in the self-declared Republic of Somaliland.
Africa is an attraction to foreign militaries: China opened its first overseas military base on August,1 in Djibouti on the Horn of Africa. Djibouti is also currently housing Americans, Japanese and French troops. readmore

Inside Story - Is China exploiting Africa?

youtube    Inside Story - Is China exploiting Africa?

Cuba in Africa: A Forgotten History

During the funeral of Nelson Mandela in South Africa, members of the United States press were surprised when President Obama was photographed shaking the hand of Cuba’s President Raul Castro. The handshake, which was purely formal and ceremonial, did not have any meaning beyond what the protocol for such occasions demands. In 2000 President Bill Clinton shook the hand of President Fidel Castro which also led to all sorts of idle speculation about the meaning of that gesture. Unfortunately, there is a blind spot in the U.S. media and a terrible lack of understanding of the context of the historical relationship between the United States and Cuba. Readmore

Fidel Castro’s anti-colonialist legacy

Cuba in Africa
Castro’s (and Guevara’s) role in assisting the decolonisation process in Africa was second to none. From the early 1960s, Castro threw all his support behind the Algerian liberation struggle against France.
Cuban doctors and soldiers were some of the first to arrive in Algeria to offer a hand to the independence forces fighting to push French colonialism out of their country.
In the following years, that support increased in size and scope across the continent. Castro offered Cuban support to the liberation struggles in Mozambique, Namibia, Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), Guinea-Bissau, and Angola, among many others.
In some cases, this support involved military interventions that did not always go according to plan. For example, in the mid-1970s after Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie was deposed by the Derg regime, Castro was forced to change sides – as the Soviets, East Germans, Czechs, and Americans also did – during a realignment of forces in the region provoked by ongoing disputes between Somalia, Ethiopia and Eritrea.

Cuban personnel were required to abandon their former ally Mohammed Siad Barre, the Somali president, who now sided with the Americans, and take sides with their new ally Mengistu Haile Mariam. Cuban troops fought the Somalian invasion of the Ogaden alongside Ethiopian forces, and by remaining in Ethiopia gave at least tacit support to Ethiopian campaigns against Eritrean guerrillas fighting for independence.
This position almost certainly became a political dilemma for Castro, who until then had always supported anti-colonial movements of liberation across the world.
While Castro’s intervention in the Horn of Africa was characterised by dubious decisions and tainted by the purges that Mengistu’s regime would eventually carry out between 1977 and 1978, his involvement in the Angolan war is the outstanding episode in his career as a champion of decolonisation.

Not only did he demonstrate to the world that Cuba was far from being a pet project of the USSR – Cuba’s support for the socialist MPLA was done without the approval of the Kremlin and almost certainly against its wishes. It also helped raise his profile, and that of Cuba, to new levels of recognition and influence throughout the developing world. readmore 

Economic Causes of Civil Conflict and their Implications for Policy

 1

Introduction

This chapter presents an economic perspective on the causes of civil war, based on

empirical patterns globally over the period 1965-99. During this period, the risk of civil

war has been systematically related to a few economic conditions, such as dependence

upon primary commodity exports and low national income. Conversely, and

astonishingly, objective measures of social grievance, such as inequality, a lack of

democracy, and ethnic and religious divisions, have had little systematic effect on risk. I

argue that this is because civil wars occur where rebel organizations are financially

viable. The Michigan Militia, which briefly threatened to menace peace in the USA, was

unable to grow beyond a handful of part-time volunteers, whereas the FARC in Colombia

has grown to employ around 12,000 people. The factors which account for this difference

between failure and success are to be found not in the `causesí which these two rebel

organizations claimed to espouse, but in their radically different opportunities to raise

revenue. The FARC earns around $700m per year from drugs and kidnapping, whereas

the Michigan Militia was probably broke. The central importance of the financial

viability of the rebel organization as the cause of civil war, is why civil wars are so unlike

international wars. Governments can always finance an army out of taxation and so

governments can always fight each other. The circumstances in which a rebel

organization can finance an army are quite unusual. This is why my analysis is entirely

confined to civil war: what I have to say has little or no bearing on inter-government war.

Because the results are so counter-intuitive, I start by arguing why social scientists should

be distrustful of the loud public discourse on conflict. I then turn to the evidence,

describing each of the risk factors in civil war. I then try to explain the observed pattern,

focusing on the circumstances in which rebel organizations are viable. Finally, I turn to

the policy implications. I argue that because the economic dimensions of civil war have

been largely neglected, both governments and the international community have missed

substantial opportunities for promoting peace

readmore

Africa and the Arab Spring: A New Era of Democratic Expectations

A question often asked since the launch of the Arab Spring in January 2011 is what effect will these popular protests have on democracy in the rest of Africa. Frequently overlooked in this discussion is that Sub-Saharan Africa has been experiencing its own democratic surge during this time with important advances in Guinea, Côte d’Ivoire, Niger, Nigeria, and Zambia, among other countries. This progress builds on nearly two decades of democratic institution building on the continent. Even so, the legacy of “big-man” politics continues to cast a long shadow over Africa’s governance norms. Regime models on the continent, moreover, remain highly varied, ranging from hard core autocrats, to semiauthoritarians, democratizers, and a select number of democracies.

Recognizing these complex and still fluid crosscurrents, this Working Group embarked on an analysis of the linkages between the Arab Spring and African democracy — with an eye on the implications for governance norms on the continent over the next several years. Read more