John F. Clark

Explaining Ugandan Intervention in Congo: Evidence and Interpretations

This paper enquires into the reasons for Ugandas 1998 intervention in the recent Congo war, arguably the most important impediment to economic and political progress in sub-Saharan Africa. It examines a number of prominent arguments about the intervention, and determines that the Rwanda–Uganda alliance should be at the centre of a ‘thick description’ of the intervention. That is, the Uganda–Rwanda alliance was the key to President Musevenis initial decision in 1998, but other explanations contribute to our understanding of the intervention by providing information about its context, justification and permissive causes. Further, the paper suggests that Ugandas initial reasons for entering Congo differ from its reasons for remaining there after having failed to realise its initial goals.

Does Democratization Reduce the Risk of Military Interventions in Politics in Africa

This article investigates whether there is an association between a trajectory of political liberalization, democratization, and military interventions. In what is arguably the ‘least likely case’ region in the world, this study analyzes the experience of 55 regimes in Africa between 1990 and 2004 and finds a striking regularity. Liberalizing, and in particular democratic, regimes have a significantly different track record of being subjected either to successful or failed military interventions. The analysis suggests that democratic regimes are about 7.5 times less likely to be subjected to attempted military interventions than electoral authoritarian regimes and almost 18 times less likely to be victims of actual regime breakdown as a result. Through an additional case study analysis of the ‘anomalous’ cases of interventions in democratic polities, the results are largely strengthened as most of the stories behind the numbers suggests that it is only when democratic regimes perform dismally and/or do not pay soldiers their salaries that they are at great risk of being overthrown. Legitimacy accrued by political liberalization seems to ‘inoculate’ states against military intervention in the political realm.

Neither war nor peace in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC): profiting and coping amid violence and disorder

This Special Issue of the Review of African Political Economy appears a decade since a landmark double issue of the journal was published in 2002. In addressing the then apparent resolution of the second Congo war, ROAPE’s editors stressed the difficulties of resolving the complex and interrelated problems linking the conflict to political and economic issues, the national and international context, and ‘issues of identity, ethnicity and nationality’ (Trefon et al. 2002). A decade on, the DRC is experiencing an absence of both outright war and a lasting peace. Periodic outbreaks of fighting, as with the M23 occupation of Goma and other parts of North Kivu in November 2012, have led to the deaths of soldiers and civilians and to the further displacement of hundreds of thousands of people. The DRC has made a limited recovery from the worst aspects of its recent conflicts, but few if any of the underlying problems have been resolved in the last decade and the complexity of doing so has not significantly diminished. In this context, this Special Issue focuses less than its predecessor on national and international political issues – although the Briefing by Theodore Trefon provides significant insight into this area. Instead, it seeks to show the ways in which some Congolese people, particularly in the east of the country, find strategies to survive, cope and in some cases even to profit from, the liminal socio-political environment in which they find themselves. This, we believe, provides a compelling sense of the political economy of ‘post-war’ DRC from the perspective of those who experience it first-hand. The articles in this issue analyse the social transformations occasioned by more than 15 years of continuing political and social violence in the DRC. These conflicts do not have a singular logic, but result from multiple local conflicts, as well as outside interventions. The violence associated with the Congo wars has caused social upheavals throughout the country, but particularly in central and eastern regions. These wars occurred in a context of a collapsed state and of a society plagued by widespread poverty, which amplified their impact. Although many existing social arrangements have been thrown into total disarray, a perhaps surprising range of new social institutions and patterns have also arisen. The articles in the Special Issue explore some of the ways in which major institutions and patterns of Congolese society have been transformed by the wars, and how new models of political engagement, economic activity and social interaction continue to evolve. This editorial will provide a limited introduction to the historical and contemporary context for these articles, explaining the valuable contribution each makes to our understanding of the DRC in relation to this context.

The Economic Impact of the Congo War

The war in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has certainly had devastating economic consequences for Congo itself, but it has also affected the whole of the central Africa region and even some countries not bordering on Congo, notably intervening Zimbabwe and Namibia. There can be no doubt that the economic potential of the entire African continent has been indirectly muted by the war’s huge disruptive impact. At the same time, of course, narrow constituencies of individuals including smugglers, arms dealers, and corrupt military officials have profited handsomely from the war.

The nature and evolution of the state in Zaïre

A number of models have been proposed to describe the state in Zaïre since the country’s independence in 1960, and many have captured important aspects of its nature and functioning. Unfortunately for the constructors of these models, the behavior of that state in relation to Zaïrian society has hardly been static, but rather has been steadily evolving. Hence, none of these models fully explains the Zaïrian state that emerged at the end of the 1970s, nor did any predict the steady decline of the Zaïrian state in the 1990s.

Realism, Neo-Realism and Africa’s International Relations in the Post-Cold War Era

This chapter explores the value of traditional Realist approaches to International Relations (IR) in helping us to understand Africa’s contemporary international relations. Realism has only infrequently been used as an analytical tool for understanding Africa’s international relations because of the ideological and moral predispositions of those who study the topic. Nonetheless, this chapter takes as a starting proposition that other traditional approaches are inadequate in providing us with a ‘master key’ to the topic, without which useful prescription or policy advice cannot be formulated. This claim is supported by several of the preceding chapters in this volume. Since all major varieties of Realism have been applied mostly to Great Power politics, however, they do not appear at first glance to have relevance for contemporary Africa. Yet this is far from the case for traditional Realism, which can be and has been applied to many different socio-political settings. Indeed, the application of traditional Realism to new historical and geographical settings such as contemporary Africa can therefore enrich the theoretical approach itself, even as it helps us to comprehend the subject matter under study. In this instance, the notion of ‘regime security,’ derived from Realism’s central focus on power and interest, is developed as a theoretical master key to Africa’s international relations.1

Museveni’s Adventure in the Congo War

To analyze foreign policy by way of historical analogy is certainly a method fraught with pitfalls, but one with advantages that are also not inconsiderable. When the historical analogue is well known to an audience, a convenient shorthand for comparison automatically exists. Moreover, when the lessons of history seem clear, the prescriptive power of past episodes can be quite strong and direct. The trick, it would seem, is to acknowledge the differences between analogous cases as well as the similarities. If due care is taken in this regard, the value of a historical analogy can be inestimable.

A Constructivist Account of the Congo Wars

ABSTRACT Although the recent encyclopedic studies of the Congo wars provide us with detailed narratives of how the wars began and myriad proximate causes, none presents an overall account of how these wars could happen. This article attempts to provide an overall account of the Congo wars using a simplified constructivist analytical framework. The account does not claim to explain the Congo wars, but rather it tries to identify a context in which they can be understood. It draws on the vocabulary of the variety of constructivism outlined by Nicolas Onuf, a variety of the epistemological approach that is particularly useful for understanding the changes in the regional rules that permitted the Congo wars to begin. Namely, Onufs focus on the rules that emerge from a dialectical interaction of relevant agents and structures is invaluable in understanding how the Congo wars could happen. These concepts help us understand how the end of the Cold War in Africa led to rapid changes in the (constructed) identities and interests of local agents and the rules that governed them. Changes in the rules constituting the identities of local agents also gave rise to a change in the norms governing relations among the key agents, African regimes. In particular, the (weak) inter-African norm against nonintervention in the affairs of neighboring states suddenly became much weaker than before. In this context, the Yoweri Museveni regime of Uganda facilitated an invasion by the Rwandan Patriotic Army of Rwandan territory in October 1990. This key, early act had a catalytic effect on changing identities in the Great Lakes region and pushed ahead the process of norm reformulation. Soon, intervention by regimes in the region into the affairs of their neighbors had become the norm, leading to the long-lasting foreign intervention in Congo. These foreign interventions set off local conflicts that continue to the present day. The new rules have implications that go far beyond the case of Congo and seem to be manifest in a number of other cases.

The Constraints on Democracy in Sub-Saharan Africa: The Case for Limited Democracy

L ? 1990, following the wave of democratization then sweeping the globe, a number of opposition campaigns began against many of rhe authoritarian regimes in Sub-Saharan Africa. The path of political reform was blazed by tiny Benin, where a national conference bringing together important groups from the civil society and government produced a new constitution in 1 990. Under diat new constitution, Mathieu Kérékou, the nonelected president of seventeen years, was voted out of office in 1 991 . The national conference route to political change was then taken by Congo, Gabon, and eventually almost every other francophone country on the continent1 In anglophone Africa, Zambia was the paradigm case. There the countrys venerable president of twenty-seven years, Kennerh Kaunda, voluntarily stepped aside and allowed free elections in November 1991, which he lost to opposition leader Frederick Chiluba. These events gave heart to opposition leaders in other anglophone African countries, including Malawi, Kenya, and Nigeria, though die results were less dramatic. Of course, in the West it has been South Africas near miraculous transformation, also beginning in 1 990, that has captured most of die attention. Since 1990 most of these movements have reached some sort of tentative resolution. In a number of countries, including Zaire and Togo, dictators have temporarily ridden out the wave of campaigns for democracy and reestablished their dominance after having apparendy been rendered impotent by their

The Uses (and Abuses) of the Economic Community of Central African States: The Hidden Functions of Regional Economic Community Membership for African Regimes

This paper examines the “hidden” functions of the Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS) for its member regimes. While the economic benefits of membership in ECCAS remain marginal, we argue that the organization ECCAS still serves important functions for its member states. Firstly, membership in ECCAS has provided savvy regimes with another avenue through which they can access donor funding. Secondly, membership in ECCAS has allowed some regimes to utilize the organization as a vehicle for exerting power in neighboring states. Thirdly, membership in ECCAS aids regimes in their continual efforts to build domestic and international legitimacy. “Overall, we argue that ECCAS’s promotion of collective security” tends not to be so much a genuine expression of communal efforts at peacebuilding, but more of a reflection of its members’ domestic insecurity and their narrow regime interests.