Foreign Intervention in Africa after the Cold War. Elizabeth Schmidt
governments for help.
Foreign assistance came with strings attached. Embracing free market ideologies that promote global capitalism, the Western-dominated international financial institutions required governments to implement draconian stabilization and structural adjustment programs as a condition for foreign loans. Private banks usually required the IMF’s seal of approval before granting commercial loans. Western development agencies and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) refused assistance to projects that did not conform to neoliberal free market norms. The result was the imposition of economic development models in which African populations had no voice. The Washington Consensus, named for the power hub of the IMF, the World Bank, and the US government, limited government involvement in the economy, requiring an end to subsidies, price controls, and protective tariffs. The mandated government cutbacks undermined health and education systems and destroyed social safety nets. Obligatory currency devaluations brought about soaring inflation and import shortages. Enforced privatization resulted in widespread retrenchment, higher unemployment, and an upsurge in crony capitalism as state-owned assets were transferred to government loyalists. These measures were particularly damaging to women, children, the elderly, and the poor. Imposed from above, the structural adjustment programs were inherently undemocratic. In many countries, the new balance of power favored governments with the means to impose unpopular measures. Foreign intervention in African economies thus resulted in widespread economic hardship and increased political repression, constituting a fundamental denial of African sovereignty.
Massive foreign debts incurred by African governments in the 1970s and 1980s continued to take their toll in the decades that followed. In many cases the borrowed money was spent on extravagant showcase projects, or on military rather than economic development; or it was lost to corruption. Successor governments were forced to service the debts with scarce foreign currency, which exhausted export earnings and resulted in further borrowing. Debt service to foreign governments, banks, and international financial institutions consumed a large percentage of government revenues that might otherwise have been allocated to essential services and economic development. Externally imposed economic policies thus laid the foundations for the political crises of the 1980s and 1990s.
When the Cold War ended, Western powers cut ties to repressive regimes they had once cultivated as Cold War allies and regional policemen. Aid pipelines were shut down, and bank loans were no longer forthcoming. Neoliberal reforms, which promoted the privatization of assets previously controlled by the state, failed to strengthen state institutions as intended. Instead, they laid the groundwork for new kinds of patronage networks that enriched loyal political and military officials, who benefited from the privatization schemes, and marginalized others, who were laid off. Some of those who were sidelined, along with others who sought a greater share of the spoils, abandoned established political and economic structures and began to operate as warlords. The warlords mobilized loyalists from the ranks of downsized functionaries and established militias of unpaid former soldiers, unemployed youth, and press-ganged children. The economic crises and externally imposed reforms thus sparked new political turmoil, which in turn stimulated further waves of political and military intervention.
After the Cold War, countries with emerging economies in the Global South joined former colonial and Cold War powers in taking a new interest in Africa. Foreign powers and corporations focused their attention on countries that were rich in crude oil, natural gas, and strategic minerals.13 They also paid attention to those that offered access to arable land, markets for manufactured goods, and lucrative infrastructure contracts. However, economic interests were rarely the primary motives for military intervention, and the relationship between the two was varied and complex. Three points should be borne in mind. First, the interests of foreign governments and corporations were not always in sync, although critics frequently conflate them. Governments sometimes protected private interests with military might; however, they also compromised those interests for broader political gains. Second, external actors made deals with African governments and local strongmen that gave them direct access to desired commodities, and they acquired rule-making powers that tipped the system in their favor. They generally prized stability, and only when political mechanisms failed did they consider military means. Third, although competition for strategic minerals figured in many conflicts, control over those resources was not always the source of the conflict. Rather, disputes with diverse origins sometimes expanded to include struggles for control over resources that in turn fueled the war efforts.
Externally Induced Climate Change
Like foreign intrusion into African economies, climate change, caused primarily by greenhouse gases generated by industrialized countries, has contributed to a growing number of the continent’s conflicts.14 As the gases trap heat in the earth’s atmosphere, glaciers have melted and oceans have warmed, causing sea levels to rise, water to evaporate, and ocean storms to intensify. These factors have resulted in increased rainfall over the oceans and less over adjacent land, provoking both severe flooding and extreme drought in many parts of the African continent. The warming of the Indian Ocean has contributed to the intensification of droughts from the Horn of Africa to the Cape and across the Eastern Sahel, while the warming of the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Guinea have exacerbated droughts in the Western Sahel. Climate change has dried up lakes and rivers and destroyed crops, herds, fish, and game. It has threatened food production, drinking water, and hydroelectric capabilities. Residents in drought-ravaged areas, in search of fuel, have denuded hills of trees; when rains finally come, they wash away the topsoil. Malnutrition and tropical diseases associated with high temperatures and humidity have grown more severe. The rapidly expanding desert has encroached on arable land. All of these factors have led to human migration on an unprecedented scale.15 Massive population displacements caused by climate change have resulted in competition for increasingly scarce arable land and water, which in turn has generated conflict between farmers and herders and between members of different ethnic groups, clans, and lineages.16 The confluence of these factors has provided fertile ground for extremist ideologies that have harnessed local discontent and mobilized populations with few alternatives for channeling their grievances.
Environmental Destruction and Plunder of Resources by Outsiders
Environmental destruction resulting from climate change has contributed to several of the regional conflicts investigated in this study. Foreign interest in African resources to mitigate the effects of climate change and population growth on other continents may be an important factor in future conflicts. The global food crisis and the search for new sources of fuel have led to substantial African land grabs by emerging economic powers, which are producing food and biofuels in Africa for consumption elsewhere. Former imperial powers that continue to hold land in their old colonies have been joined by China, India, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Singapore, and Malaysia, which have taken over major land assets in Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Madagascar, Morocco, the Republic of Congo, Sudan, Tanzania, and elsewhere. Foreign investors, primarily from Singapore and Malaysia, control virtually all of Liberia’s arable land, while 86 percent of Gabon’s arable land is under foreign contract, most of it held by Singapore. African citizens have had little if any say in these arrangements, which include no provisions for African food security or for environmental controls to protect the land, water, and air from pollution. Competition for arable land and clean water, already a factor in contemporary conflicts, is likely to contribute to future conflicts as well.
Environmental destruction as a by-product of foreign ventures is also the source of considerable conflict in Africa. Pollution of land, water, and air by foreign oil and gas companies, deforestation by foreign timber interests, and the destruction of wildlife habitats and toxic waste dumping by other external interests have jeopardized lives and livelihoods across the continent. Pollution by foreign oil companies has destroyed the fishing and agricultural industries of the Niger Delta and led to civil unrest, military crackdowns, and the emergence of criminal gangs that engage in illegal oil tapping, piracy, and kidnapping for ransom as alternative sources of subsistence. Similarly, unauthorized fishing and toxic waste dumping by foreign concerns have devastated the local fishing industry in northeastern Somalia, while climate change–induced droughts have decimated food crops and pastureland. Unemployed men have turned to piracy, first demanding fees from South Korean, Indian, and Taiwanese fishing fleets, then attacking