Peter J. Schraeder

Clarifying the Foreign Aid Puzzle: A Comparison of American, Japanese, French, and Swedish Aid Flows

This study explores the donor side of debates revolving around the proper role of foreign assistance as a foreign policy tool, by empirically testing for the aid determinants of four industrial democracies: France, Japan, Sweden, and the United States. A pooled cross-sectional time-series design is employed to assess the impacts of six sets of variables on aid flows to thirty-six African states during the 1980s. Three sets of these variables--humanitarian need, strategic importance, and economic potential--are constructed using data traditionally employed in empirical foreign aid studies. Three additional sets of variables--cultural similarity, ideological stance, and region--are constructed from data that regional specialists consider to be important in the foreign aid equation. Although no two cases are alike, one can nevertheless draw some tentative conclusions about the nature of the foreign aid regime of the final cold war decade of the 1980s on the basis of several cross-national patterns. In short, the results (1) contradict rhetorical statements of northern policymakers who claim that foreign aid serves as an altruistic foreign policy tool designed to relieve humanitarian suffering; (2) confirm the expected importance of strategic and ideological factors in a foreign aid regime heavily influenced by the cold war; and (3) underscore the importance of economic, particularly trade, interests in northern aid calculations.

Cold War to Cold Peace: Explaining U.S.-French Competition in Francophone Africa

Three watershed events dramatically influenced the evolution of African international relations during the twentieth century. First, the extended global conflict of World War 11 (1935-1945) heralded the decline of Europe as the most powerful region of the world and the emergence of African nationalist movements intent on achieving independence from colonial rule. The outbreak and intensification of the cold war (1947-1989) subsequently transformed the newly independent African countries into proxy battlefields between the United States and the former Soviet Union, the two unparalleled superpowers of the post-World War II era. African conflicts often having little, if anything, to do with the ideological concerns of communism or capitalism threatened to become East-West flashpoints in the face of U.S.-Soviet involvement. The third watershed event-the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989-signaled the end of the cold war but not the end of international rivalry in Africa. As deftly noted by Jeffrey E. Garten, former under secretary of commerce for international trade in the Clinton administration, the ideologically-based cold war between the United States and the former Soviet Union has been replaced by a cold peace in which the Great Powers struggle for economic supremacy in the highly competitive economic environment of the new millennium.1 This article explores the origins and evolution of this cold peace by focusing on rising

The Media and Africa: The Portrayal of Africa in the New York Times (1955–1995)

Eighteen U.S. soldiers were killed and dozens were wounded in a fierce battle in Mogadishu, Somalia, on October 3–4, 1993. Their deaths were a direct outgrowth of the Clinton administration’s handling of a series of United Nations (UN)-sanctioned military interventions in Somalia, which are popularly referred to as Operation Restore Hope. With the Cable News Network (CNN) providing almost instantaneous transmission to audiences in the United States and abroad, the victorious Somali forces not only paraded a captured U.S. helicopter pilot, Corporal William Durant, through the streets of Mogadishu, but also dragged the naked corpse of a U.S. soldier past mobs of Somali citizens who vented their anger by spitting on, stoning, and kicking the body.

From Berlin 1884 to 1989: Foreign Assistance and French, American, and Japanese Competition in Francophone Africa

In October 1884, the major European colonial powers of the era were invited to a conference in Berlin by the German Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck. 1 The United States also attended the proceedings as an observer nation, and its representative, John A. Kasson, signed the Berlin Convention, one of the primary purposes of which was to regulate escalating imperial conflict by officially delineating the territorial boundaries of colonial possessions. Although warfare between colonial armies in Africa during World War I underscored the failure of negotiators to avoid yet another global military conflict, the Berlin conference none the less consecrated the creation of formal European empires and ‘spheres of interest’ throughout the continent. Except for the unique cases of Ethiopia and Liberia, independent Africa eventually ceased to exist.

Understanding the “Third Wave” of Democratization in Africa

Hemmed In: Responses to Africas Economic Decline. Edited by Thomas M. Callaghy and John Ravenhill. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. Pp. xviii, 573.

Speaking with Many Voices: Continuity and Change in U.S. Africa Policies

50.00 cloth,

Social Signals and Participation in the Tunisian Revolution

18.50 paper.) The Politics of Reform in Ghana, 1982-1991. By Jeffrey Herbst. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993. Pp. xii, 180.

Aspiring to the ‘gatekeeper role’ in the realm of foreign policy? The North African Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the Arab Spring era

40.00.) Tanzania: The Limits to Development from Above. By Kjell J. Havnevik. (Uppsala, Sweden: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet; Trenton, NJ: Red Sea, 1993. Pp. 343.

The evolving impact of violent non-state actors on North African foreign policies during the Arab Spring: insurgent groups, terrorists and foreign fighters

29.95 paper.) Zaire: Continuity and Political Change in an Oppressive State. By WinsomeJ. Leslie. (Boulder, San Francisco, and Oxford: Westview, 1993. Pp. xi, 204.

Revolutionary diplomats? Introduction to the study of North African foreign policies within the context of the Arab Spring

46.95.)