International Studies - Books by Region

This book analyses major themes in twenty-first-century east African politics. Predominantly authored by researchers and academics from the region, it examines recent political developments, public policy and governance across east and southern African countries. The book advocates for a regionally-focused comparative approach across Africa, arguing that it provides a greater level of analysis than a complete continental study. Adopting a multidisciplinary approach, it covers numerous topics relating to politics, public policy, state and nation-building in Africa. Filling an important void in current literature, the book will appeal to academics, practitioners, politicians and students of politics, public policy and governance.

At the height of the Cold War, Soviet ideologues, policymakers, diplomats, and military officers perceived the countries of Africa, Asia, and Latin America as the future reserve of socialism, holding the key to victory over Western forces. The zero-sum nature of East-West global competition induced the United States to try to thwart Soviet ambitions. The result was predictable: the two superpowers engaged in proxy struggles against each other in faraway, little-understood lands, often ending up entangled in protracted and highly destructive local fights that did little to serve their own agendas. Using a wealth of recently declassified sources, this book tells the complex story of Soviet involvement in the Horn of Africa, a narrowly defined geographic entity torn by the rivalry of two large countries (Ethiopia and Somalia), from the beginning of the Cold War until the demise of the Soviet Union. At different points in the twentieth century, this region--arguably one of the poorest in the world--attracted broad international interest and large quantities of advanced weaponry, making it a Cold War flashpoint. The external actors ultimately failed to achieve what they wanted from the local conflicts--a lesson relevant for U.S. policymakers today as they ponder whether to use force abroad in the wake of the unhappy experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan.

South Sudan: Elites, Ethnicity, Endless Wars and the Stunted State is likely to achieve its objective of stimulating debate about the future of South Sudan as a viable polity. The hope is that readers, through the debate generated by this book, will rediscover the commonality that marked the struggle for freedom, justice, and fraternity, and abandon ethnic ideologies as a means of constructing a modern state in South Sudan. South Sudan: Elites, Ethnicity, Endless Wars and the Stunted State is a must-read for South Sudanese intellectuals who want to reshape the socioeconomic and political development trajectory.

In 2013 almost half of Africa's top aid recipients were ruled by authoritarian regimes. While the West may claim to promote democracy and human rights, in practice major bilateral and international donors, such as USAID, DFID, the World Bank and the European Commission, have seen their aid policies become ever more entangled with the survival of their authoritarian protégés. Local citizens thus find themselves at the receiving end of a compromise between aid agencies and government elites, in which development policies are shaped in the interests of maintaining the status quo.Aid and Authoritarianism in Africa sheds light on the political intricacies and moral dilemmas raised by the relationship between foreign aid and autocratic rule in Africa. Through contributions by leading experts exploring the revival of authoritarian development politics in Ethiopia, Uganda, Rwanda, Cameroon, Mozambique and Angola, the book exposes shifting donor interests and rhetoric as well as the impact of foreign aid on military assistance, rural development, electoral processes and domestic politics. In the process, it raises an urgent and too often neglected question: to what extent are foreign aid programmes actually perpetuating authoritarian rule?

A 2003 law in Eritrea--a notoriously closed-off, heavily militarized, and authoritarian country--mandated an additional year of school for all children and stipulated that the classes be held at Sawa, the nation's military training center. As a result, educational institutions were directly implicated in the making of soldiers, putting Eritrean teachers in the untenable position of having to navigate between their devotion to educating the nation and their discontent with their role in the government program of mass militarization. In her provocative ethnography, The Struggling State, Jennifer Riggan examines the contradictions of state power as simultaneously oppressive to and enacted by teachers. Riggan, who conducted participant observation with teachers in and out of schools, explores the tenuous hyphen between nation and state under lived conditions of everyday authoritarianism. The Struggling State shows how the hopes of Eritrean teachers and students for the future of their nation have turned to a hopelessness in which they cannot imagine a future at all.

Exiled populations, who increasingly refer to themselves as diaspora communities, hold a strong stake in the fate of their countries of origin. In a world becoming ever more interconnected, they engage in 'long-distance politics' towards, send financial remittances to and support social development in their homelands. Transnational diaspora networks have thus become global forces shaping the relationship between countries, regions and continents.This important intervention, written by scholars working at the cutting edge of diaspora and conflict, challenges the conventional wisdom that diaspora are all too often warmongers, their time abroad causing them to become more militant in their engagement with local affairs. Rather, they can and should be a force for good in bringing peace to their home countries.Featuring in-depth case studies from the Horn of Africa, including Somalia and Ethiopia, this volume presents an essential rethinking of a key issue in African politics and development.

Building, or re-building, states after war or crisis is a contentious process. But why? Sabaratnam argues that to best answer the question, we need to engage with the people who are supposedly benefiting from international 'expertise'. This book challenges and enhances standard 'critical' narratives of statebuilding by exploring the historical experiences and interpretive frameworks of the people targeted by intervention. Drawing on face-to-face interviews, archival research, policy reviews and in-country participant-observations carried out over several years, the author challenges assumptions underpinning external interventions, such as the incapacity of 'local' agents to govern and the necessity of 'liberal' values in demanding better governance. The analysis focuses on Mozambique, long hailed as one of international donors' great success stories, but whose peaceful, prosperous, democratic future now hangs in the balance. The conclusions underscore the significance of thinking with rather than for the targets of state-building assistance, and appreciating the historical and material conditions which underpin these reform efforts.

One of the key mission objectives of the UN Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (MONUC) was to disarm and repatriate foreign combatants in the eastern region of the country. To achieve this, MONUC adopted a "push and pull" strategy. This involved applying military pressure while at the same time offering opportunities for voluntary disarmament and repatriation for armed combatants of the elusive but deadly Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) - a predominantly Rwandan Hutu armed group in eastern DRC. As part of its "pull" strategy, MONUC embarked on one of the most sophisticated Information Operations (IO) campaigns in UN history with the core objective of convincing thousands of individual combatants and commanders of the FDLR to voluntarily disarm and join the UN's Demobilization, Disarmament, Repatriation, Resettlement and Reintegration programme (DDRRR). This book is derived from studies of the narratives, coordination and effectiveness of the UN's IO in support of DDRRR and how the UN has integrated IO as part of its Mission peace support operations. This book advances contemporary understanding of the relative importance of communication models and their interactions within conflict settings. It provides instruments with which conflict and communication analysts can compare predictions and rationalize Information impacts for future conflicts.

The book provides a fresh and innovative interpretation of the new government of Zimbabwe led by Emmerson Mnangagwa, which emerged in late 2017 after the downfall of Robert Mugabe. It demonstrates the contradictory character of the Mnangagwa government, involving both continuities and discontinuities in relation to Mugabe's regime. The temptation amongst Zimbabwean scholars has been to focus on the continuities and to dismiss the significance of any discontinuities, notably reform measures. This book adopts an alternative approach by identifying and focusing specifically on the existence of a formative project of the Mnangagwa's Second Republic, further analysing its political significance, as well as risks and limitations. While doing so, the book covers topics such as reform measures, reconciliation, transitional justice, corruption, the media, agriculture, devolution, and the debt crisis as well as health and education. Discussing the limitations of these different reform measures, the book highlights that any scholarly failure to identify the risks of the project leads to an incomplete understanding of what constitutes the Mnangagwa's Second Republic. The book appeals to students, scholars and researchers of Zimbabwean and African studies, political science and international relations, as well as policymakers interested in a better understanding of political reform processes.

In 1964 Kenneth Kaunda and his United National Independence Party (UNIP) government established the nation of Zambia in the former British colony of Northern Rhodesia. In parallel with many other newly independent countries in Africa this process of decolonisation created a wave of optimism regarding humanity's capacity to overcome oppression and poverty. Yet, as this study shows, in Zambia as in many other countries, the legacy of colonialism created obstacles that proved difficult to overcome. Within a short space of time democratisation and development was replaced by economic stagnation, political authoritarianism, corruption and ethnic and political conflict. To better understand this process, Dr. Larmer explores UNIP's political ideology and the strategies it employed to retain a grip on government. He shows that despite the party's claim that it adhered to an authentically African model of consensual and communitarian decision-making, it was never a truly nationally representative body. Whereas in long-established Western societies unevenness in support was accepted as a legitimate basis for party political difference, in Zambia this was regarded as a threat to the fragile bindings of the young nation state, and as such had to be denied and repressed. This led to the declaration of a one-party state, presented as the logical expression of UNIP supremacy but it was in fact a reflection of its weakening grip on power. Through case studies of opposition political and social movements rooted in these differences, the book demonstrates that UNIP's control of the new nation-state was partial, uneven and consistently prone to challenge. Alongside this, the study also re-examines Zambia's role in the regional liberation struggles, providing valuable new evidence of the country's complex relations with Apartheid-era South Africa and the relationship between internal and external opposition, shaped by the context of regional liberation movements and the Cold War. Drawing on extensive archival research and interviews, Dr Larmer offers a ground-breaking analysis of post-colonial political history which helps explain the challenges facing contemporary African polities.