| Publication |
2014.
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| Summary/Abstract |
The Kenyan scholar Ali Mazrui presented the idea of a "Pax Africana" in a seminal 1967 study, arguing that Africans should muster the will to create and consolidate peace on their own continent. Mazrui wrote in the aftermath of the Congo crisis of 1960-64, when the United Nations was struggling to keep peace amid a traumatic civil war. The fact that the world body still struggles with peacekeeping in the same country, four decades later, is an eloquent metaphor for the arduous and continuing quest for a Pax Africana. Peacekeeping efforts in Africa are often portrayed in Manichean terms. They are either spectacular "successes," as with the short-term victory of a 3,000-strong Southern African Development
Community (SADC) force that routed the M23 rebels in eastern Congo as part of a UN mission in 2013; or else they are spectacular "failures," as with the current inability of 2,000 French troops and about 6,000 Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS) peacekeepers-"rehatted" as UN troops-to stop sectarian massacres in the Central African Republic. UN missions in South Sudan (some 8,500 troops) and Sudan's Darfur region (more than 19,000 troops) are also counted as failures.
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