African military intervention in African conflicts : an analysis of military intervention in Rwanda, the DRC and Lesotho / Fako Johnson Likoti.

2006.

xx, 280 p. : col. maps ; 30 cm.

This thesis examined three military interventions in Sub-Saharan Africa which took place in the mid and late 1990s in Rwanda, the DRC and Lesotho. These interventions took place despite high expectations of international and regional peace on the part of most analysts after the collapse of cold war in 1989. However, interstate and intrastate conflicts re-emerged with more intensity than ever before, and sub-Saharan Africa proved to be no exception. The study sets out to analyse the motives and/or causes of military interventions in Rwanda in 1990, the DRC in 1996-7, and the DRC military rebellion and the Lesotho intervention in 1998. In analyzing these interventions, the study borrowed extensively from the work of dominant security theorists of international relations, predominantly realists who conceptualise international relations as a struggle for power and survival in the anarchic world. The purpose of this analysis was fourfold; firstly, to determine the reasons for military interventions and the extent to which these interventions were conducted on humanitarian grounds; secondly, to investigate the degree to which or not intervening countries were spurred by their national interests; thirdly, to assess the roles of international organisations like Southern African Development Community (SADC), the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) and the United Nations, in facilitating these interventions; as well as to evaluate the role of parliaments of intervening countries in authorising or not these military interventions in terms of holding their executives accountable. In this context, the analysis argued that the intervening countries; Angola, Botswana, Burundi, Chad, Namibia, Rwanda, Sudan, South Africa, Uganda and Zimbabwe appeared to have used intervention as a realist foreign policy tool in the absence of authorisation from the United Nations and its subordinate bodies such as the OAU and SADC.

Books / Dissertations & Theses

English

October 30, 2008

Thesis (Ph.D. (School of Government, Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences))--University of the Western Cape, 2006.

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 227-278).