Book Review - Jane Boulden, (2003), ed., 'Dealing with Conflicts in Africa: The United Nations and Regional Organizations', New York: Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract

A cognitive imagination, immediately accruing from the term ‘Africa’, reflects an unpleasant history of slavery, famine, exclusion, exploitation and mass executions; either by colonial masters or their modern puppet native rulers, having lust for self-enrichment by controlling natural resources and minings, rather the welfare of natives.The mass escalations of conflicts and huge innocent causalities in Africa brought the UN (p.13), regional and sub regional organisations in particularly OAU (now AU), ECOWAS and SADC into the theatre of African conflicts. The unsystematic working of UN and regional Organizations with their failure on several occasions such as Somalia, Rwanda etc, made it imperative, to analyze the interplay between UN and regional organizations, for an effective dealing with conflicts in Africa.The present book under review titled “Dealing with Conflict in Africa: The United Nations and Regional Organizations”, edited by Jane Boulden, makes an attempt to analyze such interplay, in a historical and legal framework, by portraying the complexities of war and geo politics, operating inside and outside the concerned organization’s involvement in conflicts. The book has been structured, around two thematic sections which are further subdivided in 9 chapters as whole. The first section, consisting of three chapters gives an overall themes and issues associated with the conflicts while the second section gives a detail analytical description of six case studies.