From the Cold War to the War on Terror, 1991–2010

Abstract

When the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991 and the Cold War ended, African client states were economically devastated, fraught with political divisions, and awash in weapons. No longer propped up by outside powers, dictators were driven from power and fragile states collapsed. In many instances, nascent prodemocracy movements were trampled as warlords, criminal gangs, and paramilitary groups devoid of political ideology or program moved into the power vacuums. The pervasive violence of the first post–Cold War decade was rooted in the political and economic crises of the Cold War era. As states and economies fragmented, opportunists mobilized the alienated, impoverished, and unemployed to claim their share of power and resources on the basis of their race, ethnicity, clan, or religion. Those who did not share these identities were excluded as unworthy and their claims as illegitimate. Marginalized out-groups were easy scapegoats for the countries’ enormous political and economic problems. Thus, the politics of exclusion laid the groundwork for intergroup violence, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. Foreshadowed by the Cold War era wars of destabilization in Angola and Mozambique, in which antigovernment forces controlled indigenous populations through terror, the wars of the 1990s were characterized by widespread violence and atrocities against civilians. Foreign intervention after the Cold War also assumed new characteristics. The state and its foreign backers no longer monopolized the means of coercion. The new wars were both privatized and globalized. Contests for control over power and resources were waged by private factions – warlords, criminal gangs, rebel groups, renegade soldiers, and old-fashioned foreign mercenaries and their new transformations as private military companies. Foreign intervention during this period involved neighboring states as well as non-African powers. Intervention was sometimes bilateral, just as it was when former colonial powers or Cold War superpowers policed their privileged domains. In other instances, it was multinational, characterized by the involvement of UN, African Union, regionally based peacekeeping forces, or international humanitarian organizations.