U.S. Policy in Postcolonial Africa

This book, a concise examination of U.S. policy in contemporary Africa, delineates various aspects of the role that the U.S. played in exacerbating and/or resolving violent conflicts in postcolonial Africa and provides a succinct historical overview of these armed conflicts. F. Ugboaja Ohaegbulam devotes considerable attention to four specific conflicts in Ethiopia-Somalia, the Western Sahara, Angola, and Rwanda and to the Clinton administration’s African Crisis Response Initiative and its sequel under George W. Bush. The book concludes that lack of congruence between local forces in conflict in Africa, as well as U.S. aims in those conflicts, was only one of the constraints on the United States in its attempts at conflict resolution. America’s counterproductive Cold War policies also defined relations with African states for far too long. Hence, the conflicts in postcolonial Africa became part of the legacy of those policies even as African problems continued to be low-priority concerns for the U.S. government. Libraries, advanced undergraduate and graduate students, and professors of African studies, as well as the general reader, will find this book useful.

Author Biography

The Author: F. Ugboaja Ohaegbulam is Professor of Government and International Affairs at the University of South Florida. He received his Ph.D. in international studies from the Graduate School of International Studies, the University of Denver. He is widely published in professional journals and has contributed chapters to several books. He is the author of West African Responses to European Imperialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, A Concise Introduction to American Foreign Policy, Towards An Understanding of the African Experience from Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, Nigeria and the UN Mission to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Nationalism in Colonial and Post-Colonial Africa. He has received several research and training grants, including those from the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Ford Foundation.