During the 2000’s, the role of China in international organizations has undergone a significant shift. Chinese involvement in Somalia is a sign that that the non-interventionist approaches adopted by China since the end of the Cold War is now clashing with its increased interests in other areas of the world, particularly in Africa.
France has attempted to maintain a hegemonic foothold in Francophone Africa to serve its interests and maintain a last bastion of prestige associated with past mastery. Do these relations retain an essentially colonialist character?
The intervention in Libya is being portrayed in the media as an attempt to save the Libyan people from destruction at the hands of a brutal and oppressive regime. When one looks at the evidence, various interests and geopolitical concerns confronting intervening nations, another motive emerges: realism.
Both the enormous diversity within Sudan in combination with the lack of a substantial “Sudanese” identity accounts for the prevalence of conflict. This absence of a widely accepted and omnipresent state identity also explains how identity is formed in relation to hegemony.
China and the west view Africa with a different set of eyes. In supporting trade with any and all nations in Africa and around the globe, China by default supports nations that have horrendous human rights track records that do not support democratic institutions. But China’s model of economic aid can be used by African nations to pull millions of people out of poverty. It is nothing more, nothing less.
African societies are already suffering from poverty, inequality and weak social cohesion. Since its emergence, HIV/AIDS has added a multifaceted layer of new dimensions to the former. It impacts on the economy, education and the food security of the household, creating a paradigm in which poverty is a challenge in stopping the HIV/AIDS epidemic and HIV/AIDS is a challenge in stopping poverty.
Predictions of “water wars” have become an important and even customary part of global diplomatic discourse. In 1995, the World Bank’s vice president for environmentally sustainable development famously asserted “if the wars of this century were fought over oil, the wars of the next century will be fought over water”. What is the truth about transboundary water and the potential for war?
There is no ecological zone which has been so degraded and laid waste to than the Niger Delta region of Nigeria. The bounties of nature bestowed on this geographical area have gradually been turned into its instruments of poverty and squalor, and the area remains grossly underdeveloped.
Neopatrimonialism is the foundation stone for the system which drives African politics. Because it is social accepted, neopatrimonial politics have managed to permeate all political levels, affecting the distribution of resources and distorting development plans and diverting aid funds to ensure the survival of the system.
Each time genocide occurs, the world cries out ‘never again’. So why does no one stop these atrocities once they begin? Why are they simply ignored until they “resolve” themselves? This essay will be seeking to answer why the humanitarian intervention failed to prevent the genocide in Rwanda. It will focus on three main possible reasons why the intervention failed.
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