Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Introduction: transboundary formations, intervention, order, and authority
- Part I Historical dimensions and intellectual context
- Part II Theoretical frameworks
- Part III Transboundary networks, international institutions, states, and civil societies
- Part IV Political economies of violence and authority
- Part V Conclusion
- 12 Toward a new research agenda
- References
- Index
12 - Toward a new research agenda
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Introduction: transboundary formations, intervention, order, and authority
- Part I Historical dimensions and intellectual context
- Part II Theoretical frameworks
- Part III Transboundary networks, international institutions, states, and civil societies
- Part IV Political economies of violence and authority
- Part V Conclusion
- 12 Toward a new research agenda
- References
- Index
Summary
The end of the Cold War ushered in a new optimism about the capacities of the international community to contend with a multitude of economic, political, and environmental problems in Africa and other regions around the world. In part, the new era held out the promise that this community would be able to devise intervention strategies and pursue international security free from geo-political calculations and ideological debates and thus be more open to dealing directly with conflict, poverty, and environmental degradation on their own terms (Boutros-Ghali 1992).
Peacekeeping, conflict prevention and post-conflict reconstruction, emergency humanitarian relief, liberalization-driven development programs, environmental cooperation and oversight, democratization, and the building of civil societies still might offer some viable courses of international action. But a considerable degree of pessimism and a growing discourse of failure have emerged recently among policy makers, scholars, journalists, and activists in the West (Rieff 1996).
Nowhere has the tendency toward pessimism been more striking than in Africa. The ongoing crisis in the Great Lakes, which we chronicled in the introduction to this volume, is perhaps the most visceral recent exemplar for the pessimistic position. In the most extreme of these views, the continent's security problems are largely internally driven, and portrayed as hopelessly intractable and impervious to improvement from outside or from within. Africa has become a symbol of the limits of intervention, international security, and of global governance more generally.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Intervention and Transnationalism in AfricaGlobal-Local Networks of Power, pp. 267 - 278Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001
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