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
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.
Introduction -- Why Do States Intervene? A Summary of Past Research -- A Quantitative Look at Adversary Military Interventions -- Summary of Factors Driving Adversary Interventions -- Summary, Signposts, and Implications -- Appendix A: Full List of Adversary Intervention Cases -- Appendix B: Coding of Adversary Case Studies -- Appendix C: Key Factors for Other U.S. Adversaries.
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.
