The book reinterprets the role of the UN during the Congo crisis from 1960 to 1964, presenting a multidimensional view of the organisation. Through an examination of the Anglo-American relationship, the book reveals how the UN helped position this event as a lightning rod in debates about how decolonisation interacted with the Cold War. By examining the ways in which the various dimensions of the UN came into play in Anglo-American considerations of how to handle the Congo crisis, the book reveals how the Congo debate reverberated in wider ideological struggles about how decolonisation evolved and what the role of the UN would be in managing this process. The UN became a central battle ground for ideas and visions of world order; as the newly-independent African and Asian states sought to redress the inequalities created by colonialism, the US and UK sought to maintain the status quo, while the Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld tried to reconcile these two contrasting views.

An introduction to African history and politics since decolonization, emphasising the political, economic and socio-economic diversity of the continent.

This book discusses the prospects for the development of the African continent as part of the emerging system of international relations in the twenty-first century. African countries are playing an increasingly important part in the current system of international relations. Nevertheless, even 60 years after gaining their independence, most of them are confronted with regional and global issues that are directly related to their colonial past and its influence. Due to Africa’s wealth of natural and geopolitical resources, the possibility of interference in the internal affairs of African countries on the part of new and traditional global actors remains very real. Leading Africanists, together with international scholars from both international relations and African studies, examine the experience of decolonization, the impact of the emergence of a unipolar world on the African continent, and the growing influence of new international actors on the African continent in the twenty-first century. In addition, the importance of African countries’ foreign policy concepts and ideological attitudes in the post-bipolar period is revealed. “This volume strengthens the intellectual bridge between Russian, African and Western scholars of international relations. Strongly recommended!” Vladimir G. Shubin, Institute for African Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences “This book presents a wide range of prominent global scholars who bring a wealth of knowledge on the subject of Africa and the world.” Gilbert Khadiagala, Jan Smuts Professor of International Relations and Director of the African Centre for the Study of the USA (ACSUS) at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. “As a genuine contribution to the field of international relations and Global South Agency, this book should be in every institution of higher education’s library.” Lembe Tiky, Director of Academic Development, International Studies Association.

Decolonisation has lost its way. Originally a struggle to escape the West’s direct political and economic control, it has become a catch-all idea, often for performing ‘morality’ or ‘authenticity’; it suffocates African thought and denies African agency. Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò fiercely rejects the indiscriminate application of ‘decolonisation’ to everything from literature, language and philosophy to sociology, psychology and medicine. He argues that the decolonisation industry, obsessed with cataloguing wrongs, is seriously harming scholarship on and in Africa. He finds ‘decolonisation’ of culture intellectually unsound and wholly unrealistic, conflating modernity with coloniality, and groundlessly advocating an open-ended undoing of global society’s foundations. Worst of all, today’s movement attacks its own cause: ‘decolonisers’ themselves are disregarding, infantilising and imposing values on contemporary African thinkers. This powerful, much-needed intervention questions whether today’s ‘decolonisation’ truly serves African empowerment. Táíwò’s is a bold challenge to respect African intellectuals as innovative adaptors, appropriators and synthesisers of ideas they have always seen as universally relevant.

This book offers a continent-wide examination of Africa's foreign policy and diplomacy, addressing the relevance of its many languages, precolonial history, traditional value systems, and previous international relationships. African statehood predates that of Europe, as well as the rest of Western civilization, and yet by imposing Western values on Africa and its peoples, European colonialism destroyed Africa's paradigm of statehood along with its value systems that were ideally suited for this majestic continent. This two-volume book provides a comprehensive survey of the issues and events that have shaped Africa from remotest antiquity to the present, and serves as the foundation of Africa's international relations, diplomacy, and foreign policy. The first volume of African Foreign Policy and Diplomacy from Antiquity to the 21st Century discusses the determinants of Africa's diplomacy from antiquity to the 18th century; the second volume addresses the further developments of its foreign policy from the 19th to the 21st century.

The 'Rhodesian crisis' of the 1960s and 1970s, and the early-1980s crisis of independent Zimbabwe, can be understood against the background of Cold War historical transformations brought on by, among other things, African decolonization in the 1960s; the failure of American power in Vietnam and the rise of Third World political power. In this history of the diplomacy of decolonization in Zimbabwe, Timothy Scarnecchia examines the rivalry between Joshua Nkomo and Robert Mugabe, and shows how both leaders took advantage of Cold War racialized thinking about what Zimbabwe should be. Based on a wealth of archival source materials, Scarnecchia uncovers how foreign relations bureaucracies in the US, UK, and South Africa created a Cold War 'race state' notion of Zimbabwe that permitted them to rationalize Mugabe's state crimes in return for Cold War loyalty to Western powers. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.