African Interventions: State Militaries, Foreign Powers, and Rebel Forces by Emizet F. Kisangani and Jeffrey Pickering

Abstract

It is difficult to overstate the significance of understanding interstate military interventions in Africa, given interventions’ prevalence and the continent's demographic, economic, geopolitical, and security importance. In their theoretically and empirically rich African Interventions: State Militaries, Foreign Powers, and Rebel Forces, Kisangani and Pickering present an ambitious and groundbreaking work focusing on the distinct nature of military interventions in Africa. In African Interventions, the authors conceptualize interstate military interventions as moving national troops or forces into another country to achieve various objectives. Other types of state support extended to a government or rebel group, such as providing funding or equipment and covert support, are excluded from this conceptualization. The concentration on interstate military interventions also excludes actions taken by intergovernmental organizations, although the authors occasionally side note some intergovernmental organization actions by the African Union, the European Union, and the United Nations within the broader narrative. Theoretically, the authors uniquely combine classic approaches to international relations with more recent civil war and intervention literature. The Westphalian understanding of sovereignty and border fixity damaged postcolonial African states in many ways. Starting from this historical reality, the authors lay out three theories that shape the causes of intervention in Africa. First, they apply classic diversionary theories of war to military intervention. They argue that superpowers, European colonial states, and African states are equally predisposed to using military intervention when they suffer from economic and political unrest. Border fixity renders military interventions a low-cost distraction for the domestic audience because it almost removes the existential threat a state may pose to another state.