Foreign Intervention in Africa after the Cold War. Elizabeth Schmidt
Affairs 87, no. 4 (July 2011): 825–50, explores the role of external powers and stakeholders in determining which civilians are to be protected. A critical assessment of the International Criminal Court and its uneven record in advancing global accountability can be found in David Bosco, Rough Justice: The International Criminal Court in a World of Power Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).
Two important works focus on the UN’s role in humanitarian intervention: Norrie MacQueen, Humanitarian Intervention and the United Nations (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), provides an overview of UN interventions in various world regions, including sub-Saharan Africa, and assesses their impact and moral implications. Carrie Booth Walling, All Necessary Measures: The United Nations and Humanitarian Intervention (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), investigates the ways in which human rights concerns have altered Security Council attitudes toward state sovereignty and explains the variation in UN response to violations.
The Cold War roots of international terrorist movements associated with Islam are explored in several texts. Three works investigate the CIA’s role in recruiting, training, and financing Muslim fighters to wage war against Soviet forces in Afghanistan; they also explore how Soviet-Afghan War veterans subsequently established worldwide terrorist networks, including al-Qaeda and its spinoff, the Islamic State. See John K. Cooley, Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism, 3rd ed. (Sterling, VA: Pluto Press, 2002); Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (New York: Penguin, 2004); and Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War and the Roots of Terror (New York: Pantheon, 2004). Jean-Pierre Filiu, From Deep State to Islamic State: The Arab Counter-Revolution and Its Jihadi Legacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), exposes the ways in which Arab autocracies quashed the Arab Spring uprisings by unleashing internal security, intelligence, and military forces, as well as street gangs and violent extremists. He argues that these actions opened the door to the Islamic State. The origins of the Islamic State are also examined in Joby Warrick, Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS (New York: Doubleday, 2015), which contends that the policies of the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations aided in the organization’s emergence and expansion.
Conceptions and misconceptions about Islamic fundamentalism, Islamism, and jihad are examined in a number of works. They include International Crisis Group, Understanding Islamism, Middle East/North Africa Report 37 (Cairo/Brussels: International Crisis Group, 2005); Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim (mentioned previously); and Martin Kramer, “Coming to Terms: Fundamentalists or Islamists?” Middle East Quarterly 10, no. 2 (Spring 2003): 65–77. Richard C. Martin and Abbas Barzegar, eds., Islamism: Contested Perspectives on Political Islam (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), presents diverse interpretations of Islamism by Muslim and non-Muslim intellectuals. Juan Cole, Engaging the Muslim World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), dispels misconceptions about various movements within Islam, distinguishing between extremists and Islamic fundamentalists who reject violence. John L. Esposito, Unholy War: Terror in the Name of Islam (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), contrasts the teachings of the Qur’an with their manipulation by a violent minority and examines the political roots of anti-Americanism in the Muslim world. Contributors to Roel Meijer’s edited collection, Global Salafism: Islam’s New Religious Movement (London: Hurst, 2009), explore commonalities and differences among various strands of Salafism and examine tensions between local and global goals. Fawaz A. Gerges, The Far Enemy: Why Jihad Went Global, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), argues that the majority of jihadis strive to transform or overthrow local regimes in the Muslim world and that only a small minority target the West. He also examines the reasons that global jihadism emerged in the late 1990s and analyzes the split in the jihadist movement that ensued. The United Nations Development Programme, Journey to Extremism in Africa: Drivers, Incentives and the Tipping Point for Recruitment (New York: UNDP, 2017), considers economic marginalization, low levels of education, absence of good governance, and security sector abuse as factors driving extremism, with religious knowledge often serving as a deterrent.
Two French scholars, Gilles Kepel and Olivier Roy, have engaged in a heated public debate about the origins of the violent extremism associated with contemporary jihadist movements. Gilles Kepel, Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), provides an overview of Islamist movements in the twentieth century, focusing especially on Iran, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Egypt, and Afghanistan. Kepel argues that in the late 1990s, Islamist movements split into a majority faction that favored Muslim democracy and a small minority that engaged in terrorist attacks to promote their goals. Gilles Kepel, The War for Muslim Minds: Islam and the West (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), tracks the origins of global jihad to the Soviet-Afghan War and argues that al-Qaeda’s ideology emerged both from Islam’s strict Salafist and Wahhabi traditions, which advocate abstention from worldly affairs, and from the more political Muslim Brotherhood, whose goal is to establish an Islamic state. Gilles Kepel, with Antoine Jardin, Terror in France: The Rise of Jihad in the West (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), examines Muslim youth who were radicalized in the West and targeted Western populations. Olivier Roy, Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), disputes the significance of conservative Islamic traditions and instead explains violent jihad as a response to social, political, and economic changes, one that is politically rather than religiously inspired. Roy argues that Islam has not been radicalized, but rather that radicalism has been Islamized. Alienated youth who had not previously been religious turned to a distorted variant of Islam for meaning, identity, and respect, just as earlier generations had embraced other radical ideologies; the result is the nihilistic rejection of a society that has rejected them. In the West, these youths have been radicalized not by established religious scholars and mosques, but in prisons—where they often serve time for petty crime—and by self-proclaimed authorities on the internet. Roy’s widely quoted challenge to Kepel’s thesis appears in Olivier Roy, “Le djihadisme est une révolte générationnelle et nihiliste,” Le Monde, November 24, 2015.
3
Identifying the Actors
Who Intervened and Why
POLITICAL, ECONOMIC, AND social instability in Africa after the Cold War resulted in new waves of foreign intervention. Global, regional, and subregional state-based organizations were central to war-making and peace-building processes, and nonstate actors associated with international terrorist networks played key roles in some conflicts. During the periods of decolonization and the Cold War, foreign states intervened in African affairs unilaterally or in collaboration with other states. Former imperial powers and new Cold War powers were the most significant sources of external intervention. After the Cold War, unilateral engagement continued. Onetime imperial and Cold War powers continued to intercede in their historical spheres of interest; Middle Eastern states and organizations took a special interest in North Africa; and African countries intervened in their neighbors’ affairs. However, multilateral intervention by organized groups of states (intergovernmental organizations) and transnational networks of nonstate actors grew increasingly important.
This chapter introduces the major foreign actors involved in African conflicts after the Cold War, including nation-states on other continents, neighboring African countries, multilateral state-based organizations, and nonstate actors associated with international terrorist networks. It distinguishes the outside contestants in decolonization and Cold War conflicts from those involved in their aftermath, and it establishes a framework for understanding the interests and motivations of the foreign actors featured in the regional case studies.
During the post–Cold War period, Western nations continued to implicate themselves in African affairs. France and the United Kingdom intervened in their former colonies, while the United States focused on its former Cold War allies and on countries deemed strategic in the war on terror. In some instances, Western powers and their allies interceded under the auspices of intergovernmental organizations such as the UN, NATO, or the EU.1 In other cases, they took unilateral action. Middle powers