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 role of foreign military intervention in African states has been a pervasive theme in the continent's political history since independence. The author of this book has followed these conflicts and has pieced together the complex chain of events that has involved the Soviet Union, Cuba, Libya, France and South Africa in domestic and interstate wars in Angola, Ethiopia, Chad, Mozambique, Somalia and elsewhere. He disentangles a complex skein of history, political ideology and ethnic conflict, to discern why African states invite intervention, why foreign states intervene and what their actions mean for the present and future stability and security of the continent
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.
A review essay on books by (1) Neta Crawford, Argument and Change in World Politics: Ethics, Decolonization and Humanitarian Intervention (Cambridge: Cambridge U Press, 2002); (2) Martha Finnemore, The Purpose of Intervention: Changing Beliefs about the Use of Force (Ithaca, NY: Cornell U Press, 2003); & (3) Anthony F. Lang, Jr., Agency and Ethics: The Politics of Military Intervention (New York: State U New York Press, 2002). A number of theory-driven books have recently appeared on the subject of military intervention. The three under review in this article are timely in explicitly associating past colonial practice with more recent military adventures. Yet each author seems to suggest that colonial (& decolonization) practices actually reinforce the humanity of the West & the validity of recent 'humanitarian' justifications for war rather than expose much that is unseemly about contemporary interventionary practice. What is the source of this apparent paradox? One answer can be found in the theoretical framework of each book. Notwithstanding the extent to which the authors have sought to be self-reflective concerning power & critical of the International Relations mainstream, all offer legitimizations for imperial/humanitarian war in wide & problematic ways. Adapted from the source document.
