Government-sanctioned mass killings in Kampuchea and Uganda in recent years argue forcefully for military intervention on humanitarian grounds. While international law does permit such intervention in special circumstances, there remains the need to devise satisfactory procedures for carrying out this intervention as well as effective international mechanisms to ensure that it is not used to promote a nation's own self-interest.
During the Nigerian civil war. Punch published a four-panel cartoon whose simplicity elegantly portrayed a common view of Africa's future. The first panel depicted an outline map of the continent; the second showed another outline map, this one inscribed with colonial frontiers. Panel 3 contained the outline map, crisscrossed with a crazy-quilt of borders. The final panel showed a heap of fragments at the bottom, the continent having disintegrated.Cartoonists enjoy the liberty to lampoon or to caricature, yet their exaggerations must be based on fact, or on a shared perception of fact. By the year 2000, will the cartoonist's version, widely shared when printed, have become reality?
The case study is focused on the last ten years of Kenyan military involvement in Somalia. It is based on literature review and expert interviews with field researchers and military members, which were conducted by the author. Through the analysis of motives for intervention, achievements, and mishaps, it examines lessons learned from the intervention. The decade long Kenya's intervention has evolved into one of the pillars of fostering the stability in the Horn of Africa. Located in this region, which is unstable, Kenya finds itself being responsible for future stabilizing efforts, as it is the only stable state left in the Horn of Africa at present days.
This article attempts to explain and predict Soviet intervention in conflicts abroad during 1950-1987. I constructed a geopolitics driven model of Soviet calculus for intervention to predict which of four levels of intervention will be undertaken: verbal/diplomatic or less, arms delivery, limited personnel, or large-scale personnel support. When tested on 403 diverse civil and interstate conflicts adapted from the Correlates of War and Conflict and Peace Data Bank projects, the model proved correct in 88% of the cases. Two other predictive rules — the Modal and the Mirror Image alternatives — were also tested and used as baselines for comparison. The results show Moscow rarely wields the sword except to rescue an embattled ally or a potential client. Although it intervened more frequently during the 1970s, an increase in the number of beleaguered clients seems to account for the trendline. The findings offer useful correctives to Cold War and Mirror Image theories.
Between 2016 and 2020, a group of activist generals successfully plotted the Brazilian military's gradual return to the political center stage with powers unseen since the dictatorship. They achieved this without formally breaking the law, suspending the democratic process or overthrowing the government. We call this a "stealth intervention," an incremental yet systematic attempt to redesign politics without causing a rupture, that fits neither in the existing typology of coups nor in the literature on democratic backsliding. We argue that Brazil's stealth intervention, built upon the military's existing tutelary prerogatives and driven by an unreformed praetorian worldview that resurfaced amidst a sustained crisis of democracy, challenges the prevalent view of the armed forces as a reactive force that intervenes in civilian politics only when its institutional interests are threatened. Finally, we show that democratic backsliding in Brazil started under Bolsonaro's predecessor, Michel Temer, and point to the generals' understudied role in this process. (JPLA/GIGA)
Between 2016 and 2020, a group of activist generals successfully plotted the Brazilian military's gradual return to the political center stage with powers unseen since the dictatorship. They achieved this without formally breaking the law, suspending the democratic process or overthrowing the government. We call this a "stealth intervention," an incremental yet systematic attempt to redesign politics without causing a rupture, that fits neither in the existing typology of coups nor in the literature on democratic backsliding. We argue that Brazil's stealth intervention, built upon the military's existing tutelary prerogatives and driven by an unreformed praetorian worldview that resurfaced amidst a sustained crisis of democracy, challenges the prevalent view of the armed forces as a reactive force that intervenes in civilian politics only when its institutional interests are threatened. Finally, we show that democratic backsliding in Brazil started under Bolsonaro's predecessor, Michel Temer, and point to the generals' understudied role in this process.
