During the first few years of the 2020s, it has become increasingly difficult to talk about the future of the Middle East and Africa without eliciting the topic of great-power competition. While these regions have long been subject to the actions of external powers, the rise of China has transformed development options and skylines across…
Tag: Africa
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable 15-30 on Gasbarri, US Foreign Policy and the End of the Cold War in Africa
The reviewers of Flavia Gasbarri’s US Foreign Policy and the End of the Cold War in Africa: A Bridge between Global Conflict and the New World Order, 1988–1994 are consistent in their overall praise for Gasbarri’s work. The main adulations from Poppy Cullen, Frank Gerits, and Robin Möser tend to focus on the fact that…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable on Kisangani & Pickering African Interventions
Emizet F. Kisangani and Jeffrey Pickering have written a groundbreaking analysis of African international relations. As a historian of international history, with a particular interest in Africa, who also teaches courses on International Relations Theory (IR) I can only applaud its appearance. Increasingly my colleagues, who combine international history and IR theory, and I are…
Roundtable 11-3 on Ethnic Politics and State Power in Africa: The Logic of the Coup–Civil War Trap
Since the periods of decolonization and the Cold War, Africa has been the site of numerous protracted conflicts. Some countries have experienced repeated cycles of violence and civil war, while other countries have headed off major conflict and maintained relative peace. What factors account for these differences? In a clear, compelling, theoretically innovative study, Philip…
Roundtable 10-13 on Constitutions and Conflict Management in Africa: Preventing Civil War Through Institutional Design
In Constitutions and Conflict Management in Africa, Alan J. Kuperman has assembled a diverse set of international scholars with different backgrounds ranging from Ph.D. candidates, to practitioners, to a distinguished professor emeritus. The book’s purpose is to contribute to a debate over whether “accommodation” or “integration” is the optimal constitutional design for African states (2-3)….
Article Review 62 on “Status Competition and Territorial Aggression: Evidence from the Scramble for Africa.” Security Studies 25:3
International relations scholars have long recognized the importance of status concerns in motivating state behavior.[1] However, surprisingly little work has disentangled status from its association with the distribution of power in the international system to identify clear conditions under which status dissatisfaction will be more or less salient. In this article, Joslyn Barnhart addresses both…