Despite its encounters with the international community in the past five centuries, Africa’s socioeconomic, legal, and political development remains a source of grave concern for many observers and scholars. While some trace…
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Essays
Prospects for Peacebuilding in Eastern Congo?
by Morten Bøås
After controlling Goma for 11 days, M23 has now left the city. This is, unfortunately, not the end of the conflict. Not only must a more lasting settlement be reached, but what happened when the Congolese army (FARDC) ran away and the world’s largest peacekeeping force, the United Nations Organization Stabilizing Mission in the Democratic […]
Book Reviews
I Did It to Save My Life: Love and Survival in Sierra Leone, by Catherine E. Bolten
by Danny Hoffman
Sierra Leone’s was a complicated war. One of the first post-Cold War conflicts, and seemingly one of the more intractable and bizarre, there is still no consensus explanation for what happened in Sierra Leone and neighboring Liberia throughout the 1990s. Scholars from political science, anthropology, history, psychology, and sociology have looked to this small West […]
Essays
AU Plays, UN Pays: The New Normal in AU-UN Security Cooperation
by Thomas Kwasi Tieku
In the momentous Security Council debate that took place in January 2012 on cooperation between the United Nations and regional organizations, the US Ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, rebuked African members on the Council for suggesting that it formally mandate the African Union (AU) to take the lead role in maintaining peace and security […]
Essays
AU-UN Synergy: Envisioning Credible Ownership of African Peace and Security Architecture?
by Linnéa Gelot
At the heart of African peace and security architecture (APSA) is the aspiration for enhanced African autonomy, often referred to as the “African solutions to African problems” agenda. When the AU commissioner for peace and security addressed the AU Peace and Security Council (AUPSC) in January 2012, he identified the primary element in strengthening the […]
Book Reviews
Achebe’s Acts of Memory
by Okey Ndibe
The brouhaha over Chinua Achebe’s There Was A Country: A Personal History of Biafra, as throngs who hadn’t read the book stood up to vociferously vilify or champion it, represented a grave disservice to a book that is extraordinarily important, a carefully calibrated document that is at once a great labor of love and yet, […]