This brief, concluding chapter draws together the main themes and arguments of the book and the ways in which peacekeeping has become embedded in the contemporary history and politics of large parts of the African continent. The chapter also reflects on the future of African peacekeeping. In doing so, it points to two trajectories relating to political systems and 'new' and 'old' peacekeepers. The authors underscore the different ways in which peacekeeping has interacted with domestic and regional politics in countries and regions governed by authoritarian versus democratic governments. Peacekeeping has played a particularly critical role in the former, it is suggested, where it has been incorporated into practices of illiberal, militarised statebuilding. The authors conclude the chapter, and book, by pointing to the relatively rapid emergence of a 'new generation' of African peacekeeping states since the early 2000s and the implications this has for the future of African peacekeeping itself.

This chapter introduces the study and its approach to examining African peacekeeping. The book is framed around two central arguments. The first is the importance of emphasising and understanding historical legacies and the European colonial enterprise when exploring and analysing African peacekeeping. The second is that African peacekeeping is best understood through the lens of practice theory, an approach which allows the authors to demonstrate just how deeply embedded in both domestic and foreign policy-making peacekeeping has become across the continent over time. The introduction then goes on to outline the data and source material which the book draws on – which includes over ten years’ worth of fieldwork data collected by the authors – and provides a chapter-by-chapter summary of the book’s structure and argument.

This chapter unpacks the critical relationship between African peacekeeping and the continent’s international relations, tracing peacekeeping’s evolution from the periphery to the heart of many bilateral and multilateral relationships. In the aftermath of the failed 1993 UN/US-led intervention in Somalia and 1994 Rwandan genocide, the authors argue, Western powers sought to disengage from direct military involvement on the continent, increasingly relying on African states and militaries to provide ‘African solutions to African problems’. This dynamic has evolved into Western (and, increasingly, Chinese and Russian) underwriting of African peacekeeping missions, from Somalia to the DRC, and the growing subsidising of African security states by international partners. The chapter examines this development and how it has enabled a range of African governments, from Chad to Ethiopia, to carve out greater room for manoeuvre in their (often aid-dependent) relations with international actors. This has, the authors argue, had profound implications for domestic politics in a number of instances.