Battleground Africa
Battleground Africa

Author: Lise Namikas

Publisher: Cold War International History

Published: 2015-09-16

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 9780804796804

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Winner of the 2013 Choice Award for Outstanding Academic Title Battleground Africa traces the Congo Crisis from post-World War II decolonization efforts through Mobutu's second coup in 1965 from a radically new vantage point. Drawing on recently opened archives in Russia and the United States, and to a lesser extent Germany and Belgium, Lisa Namikas addresses the crisis from the perspectives of the two superpowers and explains with superb clarity the complex web of allies, clients, and neutral states influencing U.S.-Soviet competition. Unlike any other work, Battleground Africa looks at events leading up to independence, then considers the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the series of U.N.-supported constitutional negotiations, and the crises of 1964 and 1965. Finding that the U.S. and the USSR each wanted to avoid a major confrontation, but also misunderstood its opponent's goals and wanted to avoid looking weak or losing its political standing in Africa, Namikas argues that a series of exaggerations and misjudgements helped to militarize the crisis, and ultimately, helped militarize the Cold War on the continent.

Africa
Africa

Author: Air University (U.S.). Library

Publisher:

Published: 1982

Total Pages: 76

ISBN-13:

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Remaking the World
Remaking the World

Author: Jessica M. Chapman

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 2023-07-25

Total Pages: 367

ISBN-13: 0813197503

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Between 1945 and 1965, more than fifty nations declared their independence from colonial rule. At the height of the Cold War, the global process of decolonization complicated US-Soviet relations, while Soviet and American interventionism transformed the decolonizing process. Remaking the World examines the connections between the Cold War and decolonization. Through six carefully selected case studies—India, Egypt, the Congo, Vietnam, Angola, and Iran—historian Jessica M. Chapman addresses the shifting of Soviet, American, Chinese, and Cuban policies, the centrality of modernization, the role of the United Nations, the influence of regional actors like Israel and South Africa, and seminal post–Vietnam War shifts in the international system. Each case study analyzes at least one geopolitical turning point, demonstrating that the Cold War and decolonization were mutually constitutive processes in which local, national, and regional developments altered the superpower competition. Chapman presents the complexities of international relations and the ways in which local communist and democratic movements differed from their Soviet and American ties, as did their visions for independence and success.

Crisis In Africa
Crisis In Africa

Author: Arthur Gavshon

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-05-20

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 0429725612

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The great power rivalry surging across Africa today is a heritage of those European statesmen who a century ago in Berlin ruled straight lines on school atlases to carve up a continent-and whole nations with it-into tidy colonial compartments. With African states searching for a political identity in the post-colonial era, the superpowers are now j

Building States
Building States

Author: Eva-Maria Muschik

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2022-04-13

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 023155351X

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Postwar multilateral cooperation is often viewed as an attempt to overcome the limitations of the nation-state system. However, in 1945, when the United Nations was founded, large parts of the world were still under imperial control. Building States investigates how the UN tried to manage the dissolution of European empires in the 1950s and 1960s—and helped transform the practice of international development and the meaning of state sovereignty in the process. Eva-Maria Muschik argues that the UN played a key role in the global proliferation and reinvention of the nation-state in the postwar era, as newly independent states came to rely on international assistance. Drawing on previously untapped primary sources, she traces how UN personnel—usually in close consultation with Western officials—sought to manage decolonization peacefully through international development assistance. Examining initiatives in Libya, Somaliland, Bolivia, the Congo, and New York, Muschik shows how the UN pioneered a new understanding and practice of state building, presented as a technical challenge for international experts rather than a political process. UN officials increasingly took on public-policy functions, despite the organization’s mandate not to interfere in the domestic affairs of its member states. These initiatives, Muschik suggests, had lasting effects on international development practice, peacekeeping, and post-conflict territorial administration. Casting new light on how international organizations became major players in the governance of developing countries, Building States has significant implications for the histories of decolonization, the Cold War, and international development.

The Ideological Scramble for Africa
The Ideological Scramble for Africa

Author: Frank Gerits

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2023-03-15

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 1501767933

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In The Ideological Scramble for Africa, Frank Gerits examines how African leaders in the 1950s and 1960s crafted an anticolonial modernization project. Rather than choose Cold War sides between East and West, anticolonial nationalists worked to reverse the psychological and cultural destruction of colonialism. Kwame Nkrumah's African Union was envisioned as a federation of liberation to challenge the extant imperial forces: the US empire of liberty, the Soviet empire of equality, and the European empires of exploitation. In the 1950s, the goal of proving the potency of a pan-African ideology shaped the agenda of the Bandung Conference and Ghana's support for African liberation, while also determining what was at stake in the Congo crisis and in the fight against white minority rule in southern and eastern Africa. In the 1960s, the attempt to remake African psychology was abandoned, and socioeconomic development came into focus. Anticolonial nationalists did not simply resist or utilize imperial and Cold War pressures but drew strength from the example of the Haitian Revolution of 1791, in which Toussaint Louverture demanded the universal application of Europe's Enlightenment values. The liberationists of the postwar period wanted to redesign society in the image of the revolution that had created them. The Ideological Scramble for Africa demonstrates that the Cold War struggle between capitalism and Communism was only one of two ideological struggles that picked up speed after 1945; the battle between liberation and imperialism proved to be more enduring.

A Military History of the Cold War, 1962–1991
A Military History of the Cold War, 1962–1991

Author: Jonathan M. House

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2020-09-24

Total Pages: 465

ISBN-13: 0806167785

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Study of the Cold War all too often shows us the war that wasn’t fought. The reality, of course, is that many “hot” conflicts did occur, some with the great powers' weapons and approval, others without. It is this reality, and this period of quasi-war and semiconflict, that Jonathan M. House plumbs in A Military History of the Cold War, 1962–1991, a complex case study in the Clausewitzian relationship between policy and military force during a time of global upheaval and political realignment. This volume opens a new perspective on three fraught decades of Cold War history, revealing how the realities of time, distance, resources, and military culture often constrained and diverted the inclinations or policies of world leaders. In addition to the Vietnam War and nuclear confrontations between the USSR and the United States, this period saw dozens of regional wars and insurgencies fought throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Cuba, Pakistan, Indonesia, Israel, Egypt, and South Africa pursued their own goals in ways that drew the superpowers into regional disputes. Even clashes ostensibly unrelated to the politics of East-West confrontation, such as the Nigerian-Biafran conflict, the Falklands/Malvinas War, and the Indonesian occupation of East Timor, involved armed forces, weapons, and tactics developed for the larger conflict and thus come under House’s scrutiny. His study also takes up nontraditional or specialized aspects of the period, including weapons of mass destruction, civil-military relations, civil defense, and control of domestic disorders. The result is a single, integrated survey and analysis of a complex period in geopolitical history, which fills a significant gap in our knowledge of the organization, logistics, operations, and tactics involved in conflict throughout the Cold War.

Holding the Line
Holding the Line

Author: George White

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Published: 2005-11-04

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 1461637368

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The rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union intensified as Dwight D. Eisenhower entered the White House. However, the burning question for the vast majority of the world's population was not whether they would join the "Free World" or the Soviet bloc, but whether they could achieve meaningful self-determination. Nowhere did the answer to that question loom larger than in Africa. The Eisenhower administration's confrontation with Africa demonstrates the significance of race in the creation and execution of American foreign policy. In this new work, historian George White, Jr. explores the ways in which Eisenhower diplomacy, influenced by America's racialized fantasies, fears, and desires, turned the Cold War into a global sanctuary for the rehabilitation of Whiteness. In turn, American statesmen and bureaucrats justified the undermining of democracy and freedom by stuffing the multi-faceted realities of African aspirations and Western privileges into the straitjacket of a bi-polar worldview. Using as its foundation American relations with Ethiopia, Ghana, South Africa, and the Congo, Holding the Line demonstrates the power of race to warp perception and to severely limit the parameters and possibilities of human engagement. Holding the Line provides a fresh perspective on 1950s era U.S. foreign relations that remain salient in American diplomacy today. This is a book that will be of interest to students of American diplomatic history, Critical Race and Whiteness studies, American studies, and international relations.

Modern African Conflicts
Modern African Conflicts

Author: Timothy J. Stapleton

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2022-06-30

Total Pages: 429

ISBN-13: 1440869707

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An essential resource for students or general readers interested in post-colonial Africa, this encyclopedia provides coverage of different regions, countries, wars, battles, factions, leaders, and foreign powers. Armed conflict represents a substantial part of African history since around 1960, yet this history is either insufficiently taught or overshadowed by negative stereotypes about African "tribal warfare." In an effort to introduce this vital topic to students and general readers alike, this one-volume encyclopedia provides concise historical information on conflicts that occurred in postcolonial Africa. The entries cover all the regions of Africa (North, West, Central, East, and Southern); the Cold War and post–Cold War periods; a range of important leaders; various types of conflicts from civil wars and insurgencies to conventional military engagements; involvement of foreign powers; and such themes as airpower, women and war, and genocide.