This chapter examines how the ‘Indo–Pacific’ concept became entrenched as the primary frame of reference for Australian regional security between 2016 and 2020. It first briefly reviews the process by which the ‘Asia–Pacific’ descriptor was jettisoned in favour of the ‘Indo–Pacific’ to capture Australia’s conception of its region and its place therein, and how this affected related policies. The chapter next examines Australia’s efforts to engage the region’s major powers, as well as the sub-regions of Southeast Asia and the South Pacific, to illustrate how the Indo–Pacific framework governed Australia’s approach to regional security. Australia’s enunciation of the Indo–Pacific concept, the chapter shows, facilitated closer relations with the US, Japan and India, but it created frictions with China and gained only limited acceptance in Southeast Asia and the South Pacific.

This chapter explores how the four East African liberation movements transitioned into governments and begun to negotiate their place within the region. The central argument of this chapter is that the early regional relationships of EPRDF, EPLF and NRM post-liberation elites were dominated by pragmatic, domestic preoccupations, and managing tensions with, and the distrust of, regional counterparts. Revolutionary change, at least at the regional level, was therefore far from being a lodestar. Diplomatically isolated for much of its first decade in power, NRM Uganda found itself in an instantly antagonistic set of relationships with its conservative neighbours, who feared it would seek to replicate its revolution in their own territories. Seeking to allay these concerns, Kampala promoted itself as a regional conflict mediator in Somalia and vacillated in its support for the RPF, which launched its first invasion of Rwanda from Uganda in 1990. In the Horn, EPRDF and EPLF elites focused mainly on settling the question of Eritrean independence and the shape of post-liberation Ethiopia’s political and constitutional order. The elites of Ethiopia, Eritrea and Uganda first came together in the early 1990s around shared security concerns – the perceived threat from Omar al-Bashir’s Islamist Sudan – rather than ideological agendas.

Chapter 4 explains how an initially defensive alliance between the post-liberation elites of the region developed into a more philosophical, aspirational and militarised one, focused – putatively – around promoting regional liberation projects. The chapter demonstrates how summitry around support for the South Sudanese SPLM/A during this period provided a space for the four movements to share ideas on promoting wider regional transformation, most notably in Zaïre – a notion that spoke to their shared heritage as liberation movements and shared understanding of violence as an effective reform mechanism. The chapter cautions, however, against understanding the four elites’ involvement in the Zaïre/Congo wars as motivated by a coherent understanding of, and commitment to, regional liberation. The Horn movements’ engagement took place at a much more theoretical and superficial level than those of the Great Lakes, and elites in Addis Ababa, Asmara and Kampala took a quite different view on legitimate ways to promote liberation in Zaïre to counterparts in Kigali. The chapter also reflects, then, on the challenges encountered by post-liberation movements in reframing their country’s place in regional security frameworks, and in reimagining struggle era ideational frameworks in a new context.

This chapter introduces the purpose and core arguments of the book, which focuses on exposing, examining and underlining the acute challenges faced by East African post-liberation movements seeking to re-structure and transform regional politics. The analysis that follows argues for the importance of common ideological, ideational and aspirational frameworks around pan-Africanism and liberation across the four post-liberation elites in their negotiation of a place in the region. The conceptual framework developed nonetheless also underlines how far these movements needed to accommodate a range of competing forces and pressures in the years following their victories, reformist ambitions often sitting uncomfortably alongside the practicalities of regional diplomacy and, increasingly, regime maintenance and intra-movement politics. The chapter also emphasises the importance of understanding these post-liberation elites as social, as well as ideological and pragmatic, actors.