Africa: post-colonial intervention amidst fragile statehood

Abstract

Since its first military intervention in the Congo in 1960, the United Nations has deployed military personnel in twenty-five operations to eighteen African countries. Of these, twenty-two missions in seventeen countries have begun since 1990. In some respects this is surprising. The stresses of the decolonisation process and its aftermath throughout the 1960s and 1970s certainly created situations which would have seemed to call out for UN military intervention. The UN's military intervention in Namibia was to be the first of the wave of post-Cold War deployments in sub-Saharan Africa. Some of these operations have been created to meet different problems in the same country at different times. The United Nations Aouzou Strip Observer Group and the United Nations Mission in Ethiopia and Eritrea formed a small and very untypical minority of the UN's interventions in Africa. For the most part, these have been in intra-state conflicts. The chapter discusses UN humanitarian intervention and peacekeeping in Africa, focusing on Somalia, Rwanda and Darfur.