Foreign Intervention in Africa after the Cold War. Elizabeth Schmidt
did not harm the African poor, but neither were they sufficient to reduce poverty. See David E. Sahn, ed., Economic Reform and the Poor in Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); and David E. Sahn, Paul A. Dorosh, and Stephen D. Younger, Structural Adjustment Reconsidered: Economic Policy and Poverty in Africa (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Léonce Ndikumana and James K. Boyce, Africa’s Odious Debts: How Foreign Loans and Capital Flight Bled a Continent (London: Zed, 2011), focuses on capital flight from Africa and the role of foreign debt in the current crises.
Post–Cold War political crises in African states are considered from diverse perspectives. Books on the failure of state institutions written from Western political science perspectives include I. William Zartman, ed., Collapsed States: The Disintegration and Restoration of Legitimate Authority (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1995); Robert I. Rotberg, When States Fail: Causes and Consequences (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); and Robert H. Bates, When Things Fell Apart: State Failure in Late-Century Africa (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008). A critique of Western theories of weak, fragile, troubled, failed, and collapsed African states and the ways in which Western powers have responded can be found in Charles T. Call, “The Fallacy of the ‘Failed State,’” Third World Quarterly 29, no. 8 (2008): 1491–1507. Diverse views are offered in the collection edited by Leonardo A. Villalón and Phillip A. Huxtable, The African State at a Critical Juncture: Between Disintegration and Reconfiguration (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998).
Jean-François Bayart, Stephen Ellis, and Béatrice Hibou, The Criminalization of the State in Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), examines the role of the state in the plunder of resources, privatization of armies and state institutions, and involvement in global criminal networks. Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz, Africa Works: Disorder as Political Instrument (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), shows how African political actors have manipulated ethnic and regional tensions and used the ensuing disorder to obtain and maintain power. William Reno, Warlord Politics and African States (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998), considers the destruction of bureaucratic state structures of revenue collection, policing, and provision of social services in post–Cold War Africa and their replacement by warlords whose goal is to plunder economic resources rather than to mobilize citizens. Pierre Englebert, Africa: Unity, Sovereignty, and Sorrow (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2009), argues that states have failed to protect their citizens yet continue to endure because they offer benefits to regional and national elites.
A number of works provide a deeper understanding of post–Cold War conflicts in Africa. Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), explores the causes of increased ethnic violence in the 1990s and the reasons the international community failed to stop it. William Reno, Warfare in Independent Africa (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), focuses on African internal conflicts, including anticolonial movements, reformist rebellions, and warlord-led insurgencies. David Kilcullen, The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), offers an overview of the interactions of local insurgencies, international movements, and the global war on terror. Several edited collections examine diverse insurgencies and civil wars. Paul D. Williams, War and Conflict in Africa, 2nd ed. (Malden, MA: Polity, 2016), assesses the causes and consequences of more than 600 armed conflicts in Africa from 1990 to 2015, including the impact of outside intervention. See also Christopher Clapham, ed., African Guerrillas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998); Morten Bøås and Kevin C. Dunn, eds., African Guerrillas: Raging against the Machine (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2007); Morten Bøås and Kevin C. Dunn, eds., Africa’s Insurgents: Navigating an Evolving Landscape (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2017); Paul Richards, ed., No Peace, No War: An Anthropology of Contemporary Armed Conflicts (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005); and Preben Kaarsholm, ed., Violence, Political Culture and Development in Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006).
Several works examine African conflicts and peace agreements. Two companion volumes edited by Alfred Nhema and Paul Tiyambe Zeleza examine the causes of and possible solutions to African conflicts from African perspectives: The Roots of African Conflicts and The Resolution of African Conflicts (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008). Adebayo Oyebade and Abiodun Alao, eds., Africa after the Cold War: The Changing Perspectives on Security (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1998), assesses civil conflicts, economic crises, and environmental degradation as the primary threats to post–Cold War African security. Grace Maina and Erik Melander, eds., Peace Agreements and Durable Peace in Africa (Scottsville, South Africa: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2016), offers a framework for evaluating prospects for a successful accord. Case studies for Côte d’Ivoire, the DRC, Somalia, and Sudan are especially relevant. Séverine Autesserre, Peaceland: Conflict Resolution and the Everyday Politics of International Intervention (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), explains why international peace interventions often fail, scrutinizing the modes of thought and action that prevent foreign interveners from thinking outside the box. A sharp assessment of past failures and future prospects for democracy can be found in Nic Cheeseman, Democracy in Africa: Successes, Failures, and the Struggle for Political Reform (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
The post–World War II emphasis on human rights and humanitarian intervention is the focus of several works. Samantha Power, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 2002), analyzes six twentieth-century genocides and the US government’s failure to stop them. This study has been pivotal to recent debates on international law and human rights policies and had an important political impact on the Obama administration. Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), contends that post-1960s discontent with regimes established on the basis of utopian and anticolonial ideologies paved the way for human rights as a justification for international actions that challenged state sovereignty. Timothy Nunan, Humanitarian Invasion: Global Development in Cold War Afghanistan (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), argues that foreign intervention in Afghanistan during the Cold War and its aftermath became the model for future humanitarian interventions that destabilized societies and undermined national sovereignty in the Global South. Alex de Waal, “Writing Human Rights and Getting It Wrong,” Boston Review, June 6, 2016, casts a critical eye on humanitarian intervention lobbies, particularly those that focused on Somalia, Sudan, and Rwanda. He argues that their judgments were often ill-informed and reduced complex situations to straightforward narratives of heroes and villains; as a result, the military interventions they promoted sometimes did more harm than good. Carrie Booth Walling and Susan Waltz’s website, Human Rights Advocacy and the History of International Human Rights Standards (http://humanrightshistory.umich.edu/). It is especially useful for teachers, students, researchers, and advocates.
A number of works examine the reshaping of international legal principles and the struggle for global accountability. Two are central to discussions of the responsibility to protect: Francis M. Deng, Sadikiel Kimaro, Terrence Lyons, Donald Rothchild, and I. William Zartman, Sovereignty as Responsibility: Conflict Management in Africa (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1996); and Francis M. Deng, “From ‘Sovereignty as Responsibility’ to the Responsibility to Protect,” Global Responsibility to Protect 2, no. 4 (2010): 353–70. Elizabeth Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World: America’s Vision for Human Rights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), examines the role of New Deal visionaries in constructing the postwar international order that eroded the primacy of national sovereignty and strengthened the position of human rights.
Other works critique the new human rights/R2P discourse and international actions based on its principles. Robert Meister, After Evil: A Politics of Human Rights (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), argues that the democratic capitalist world has monopolized the concept of “human rights,” producing a version that does not challenge the structural inequalities that underlie poverty and oppression, and has used the responsibility to protect paradigm to justify militaristic ventures. Alex J. Bellamy and Paul D. Williams, “The New Politics of Protection? Côte d’Ivoire, Libya and