...The Root Cause of the Politically Unstable State of the Sudan Introduction Between the 1870s and 1900, Africa faced a process of European aggression, invasion, and eventual conquest and colonization. The European imperialist push to take over Africa was driven by the industrial revolution and the hopes of becoming a world power. After two world wars, countries that had previously been colonized agitated for independence, and eventually colonial powers withdrew their administrators from Africa. For each African state, becoming independent meant something far more than simply gaining back territory. For some, it was the beginning of a stable government, a local economy and a cultural comeback. For others such as the Sudan, it was the start of tragic consequences driven by political conflicts and civil wars. Through the process of decolonization that began, African leaders worked to shape the character of their postcolonial state, usually either against the continued European cultural and political predominance, while others worked with European powers in order to maintain an economically and politically stable state. As the success of each nation and region of Africa widely varied after their independence, their progress also varied. Unfortunately, some are still struggling to overcome these crucial instabilities preventing them from being at peace within their own state, and internationally. By examining Sudan and the decades leading up to its current political, social...
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...Chinese to tap in and secure natural resources in Africa through the Chinese-African trade and diplomatic relations. Though its growing interest in Africa has resulted in huge capital flows into the continent and increased exports of natural resources from Africa, it is the purpose of this paper to determine if this relationship is creating shared prosperity for both countries. It is also vital to outline the contexts of African crisis and Chinese expansionisms. The paper also tries to explain how Chinese renewed interest in the continent has been manifested and provides an analysis of its main effects. However, though Chinese involvement in Africa is subject to debate, it certainly does no, to a greater extent, merit accusations of neo-colonialism. It also brings with it some potential for greater socio-economic development, although this depends to...
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...TABLE OF CONTENTS Regional Conflicts in Africa • Introduction……………………………………………………………………….2 • Regional Conflict…………………………………………………………………...2 • Angola: • Angolan War for independence…….…………………………………………...3 • Angolan Civil War………………………………………………………………...5 • Sudan: • Darfur Conflict…………………………………………………………………....5 • Burundi: • Burundian Conflict………………………………………………………………7 • Nigeria: • Nigerian civil war………………………………………………………………..9 • Rwanda: • Civil War of Rwanda……………………………………………………………..11 • Liberia: • Sierra Leon vs. Liberia………………………………………………………….12 • Democratic Republic of Congo…………………………………………………….13 • South Africa……………………………………………………………………….14 REGIONAL CONFLICTS IN AFRICA Since gaining independence many West African nations have undergone political instability. There have been many wars in Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Cote d’Ivoire. Since the end of colonialism, West African states have often been affected by instability, corruption, violence, and authoritarianism. The region has seen the most brutal and serious conflicts that have ever taken place, such as the Angolan Civil War, First Liberian Civil War, Second Liberian Civil War, Guinea-Bissau Civil War, Ivorian Civil War, and the Sierra Leone Civil War. In this paper we’ll try to analyze the causes, costs and impacts of these regional conflicts and war, while giving a brief history of it. REGIONAL CONFLICT: According to Rightspeak Glossary, “Regional conflict is a war requiring...
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...one of the most important religious ritual acts. “Religion is capable of bringing out the noblest trait of our shared humanity. It can also, unfortunately, motivate or justify the most depraved.” (Lewis M. Hopfe, Mark R. Woodward, 2009, p.10). Sacrifice, which is one of the most common practices in all of the religions of the world, is another form of religious violence. All throughout history sacrifices have been made to the gods and the spirit world, usually the sacrifices was food, drinks, or animals, but occasionally there would be a human sacrifice. Human sacrifices rarely occurred in Native American religions in the United States and Canada, but they were a very important part of religion to the Aztec and other native people of South and Central America. Native Americans living in the Great Plains have a “Sun Dance” which involves self-torment or self-sacrifice. It is viewed as a way of obtaining spiritual power that is necessary for survival. Native Americans have always used peyote in their ceremonies, but it wasn’t until the United States government humiliated and defeated them that they felt that they needed more visions and started using peyote more often than before. The Native American Church still uses...
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...The instances of genocide in the late 20th century stand as a testament to how unreliable the nation state can be when inalienable and human rights are concerned. As is shown in the case of Rwanda, non-state actors have taken steps to trample on these rights even when the victim technically has citizenship in a country. Additionally, the nation-state can reinforce the actions of the non-state actors through either sponsorship, or even inaction in the face of genocide. Civil society actors have taken steps to act where the nation-state has failed to do so out of what Ayers identifies as labeling the conflict as internal or a civil war. Ultimately, both Ayers and Power agree that labeling genocide as what it is, and taking other steps outside of raw military force can go a long way in preventing the atrocities of the 20th century. More specifically, since the nation-state alone cannot be trusted to handle these situations, civil society must take steps to better the diplomacy of the nation-state, along with creating an international community that can work together to remedy the problems of human and inalienable rights violations. In her article “Raising the Cost of Genocide,” Samantha Power examines the historical response to genocide by discussing the ways in which western powers have avoided responsibility for 20th century atrocities. She begins her article by explaining the invention of the word genocide as a word meant to “send shudders down the spines of those who heard it...
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...| | [pic] [pic] [pic] [pic] [pic] |Scholarship Positions Newsletter | 80 Scholarships are available undergraduate and postgraduate students to study at the University of Cambridge. International postgraduate applicants should apply by 2 December 2015, and home/EU postgraduate applicants by 6 January 2016. Never Miss a Scholarship: Apply on Time Cambridge International Scholarship Scheme (CISS) in UK, 2016-2017 Provided by: The University of Cambridge, via the Cambridge Trusts Courses: Research Program leading to the PhD Subjects: Multiple Subjects Eligible Students: International Students Application Deadline 2 December 2015 Apply Now Tags: 2016, Cambridge, Featured, International, PhD, Scholarship, September Week 1 (i), UK University of London Free Online Course On Brand Management Provided by: University of London & Coursera Application Deadline Course starts Oct 7, 2015 Tags: 2015, Coursera, Management, University MOOC JSPS Invitation Fellowships for International Applicants in Japan, 2016 Provided by: Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS), Japan Courses: Research Programme Subjects: Humanities, Social Sciences and Natural Sciences Eligible Students: International Applicants Application Deadline September 4, 2015...
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... qwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmrtyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmrtyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmrtyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmrtyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnmqwe...
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...in the West have for a long time assumed and taken for granted. Thanks in part to depictions of Africa which rarely extend past civil wars, famine and the primitive; information about Africa’s past advances and accomplishments have continued to remain obscure and little known. Since first contact between Europe and Africa the history of Africa has been fundamentally dominated by the way Europeans have portrayed themselves in relationship to that continent. So that most of what we read and see about Africa tends to say -- either directly or indirectly -- more about the history of European colonialism and its biases toward Africa than it does about the real Africa and its people (see Ahmad, 1987). The majority of people today of all backgrounds, including those of African ancestry, tend to know little about Africa and its history outside of the transatlantic slave trade and perhaps colonialism. While even in these instances knowledge about these events can be at times, limited. The African continent is too often conceived of as one with no legitimate history before contact with Europeans. Formal anthropological research is now showing that this notion could not be further from the truth. In the bible Ham's sons are believed to have fathered the peoples of Africa. Of Ham's four sons, Canaan, fathered the Canaanites, while Mizraim fathered the Egyptians, Cush the Cushites and Phut the "Libyans". Nimrod, the Grandson of Ham and son Cush, is written to have been the father the...
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...Height of slave trade A Point of No Return in Ouidah, Benin, a former gateway for slaves to slave ships. Slavery had long been practiced in Africa.[38][39] Between the 7th and 20th centuries, Arab slave trade (also known as slavery in the East) took 18 million slaves from Africa via trans-Saharan and Indian Ocean routes. Between the 15th and the 19th centuries (500 years), the Atlantic slave trade took an estimated 7–12 million slaves to the New World. In West Africa, the decline of the Atlantic slave trade in the 1820s caused dramatic economic shifts in local polities. The gradual decline of slave-trading, prompted by a lack of demand for slaves in the New World, increasing anti-slavery legislation in Europe and America, and the British Royal Navy's increasing presence off the West African coast, obliged African states to adopt new economies. Between 1808 and 1860, the British West Africa Squadron seized approximately 1,600 slave ships and freed 150,000 Africans who were aboard. Action was also taken against African leaders who refused to agree to British treaties to outlaw the trade, for example against "the usurping King of Lagos", deposed in 1851. Anti-slavery treaties were signed with over 50 African rulers. The largest powers of West Africa (the Asante Confederacy, the Kingdom of Dahomey, and the Oyo Empire) adopted different ways of adapting to the shift. Asante and Dahomey concentrated on the development of "legitimate commerce" in the form of palm oil...
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...Ebola, biological warfare against Africa? [pic] A handout picture taken and released on September 21, 2014 by the Spanish Defense Ministry shows a military medical team transferring, from Freetown airport in Sierra Leone to Spain, Roman Catholic missionary Manuel Garcia Viejo, who contracted the deadly Tue Sep 23, 2014 7:27AM GMT 12 378 130 By Abayomi Azikiwe Related Interviews: • [pic]‘US seeks militarized response to Ebola’ A team of eight experts and journalists visiting the southern region of the West African state of Guinea were found dead in the town of Nzerekore on Sept. 20. Reports indicate that they were there to educate people about the nature of the disease for the purpose of its prevention. Reports from Guinea say that the delegation had met with elders in the community but were later attacked by youths. Investigations into the details of the killings are ongoing. There is tremendous mistrust surrounding the spread of the Ebola virus disease in some West African states where the epidemic has had an impact. Doctors Without Borders reported in April that their teams were forced to withdraw from Macenta in Guinea after being stoned by youths who said they were there to spread the disease. Newspaper articles and rumors have circulated that the outbreak is a direct result of biological warfare being waged by imperialist countries against the African continent. Although no one knows what the motivations were of those who carried out the killings in...
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...Clash Of civilisation The Clash of Civilizations (COC) is a hypothesis that people's cultural and religious identities will be the primary source of conflict in the post-Cold War world. It was proposed by political scientist Samuel P. Huntington in a 1992 lecture at the American Enterprise Institute, which was then developed in a 1993 Foreign Affairs article titled "The Clash of Civilizations? in response to his former student Francis Fukuyama's 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man. Huntington later expanded his thesis in a 1996 book. Huntington began his thinking by surveying the diverse theories about the nature of global politics in the post-Cold War period. Some theorists and writers argued that human rights, liberal democracy, and capitalist free market economy had become the only remaining ideological alternative for nations in the post-Cold War world. Specifically, Francis Fukuyama argued that the world had reached the 'end of history' in a Hegelian sense. Huntington believed that while the age of ideology had ended, the world had only reverted to a normal state of affairs characterized by cultural conflict. In his thesis, he argued that the primary axis of conflict in the future will be along cultural and religious lines. As an extension, he posits that the concept of different civilizations, as the highest rank of cultural identity, will become increasingly useful in analyzing the potential for conflict. In the 1993 Foreign Affairs article, Huntington writes: ...
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...Scott Reeves – History 122 Final Exam Stop Pulling “a LeBron James” and Stay Home The United Nations Economic Commission for Africa said, “The emigration of African professionals to the West is one of the greatest obstacles to Africa’s development.” Colonialism was a major influence on the development in Africa. Since there were so many setbacks in multiple African countries, such as Belgium in the Congo, France in West Africa, and the British in places all over the continent, it has caused countries to have trouble economically and politically. Whether or not there are greener pastures in foreign lands, the people of Africa are hurting the continent’s growth by leaving, even if they come back years later. The continent needs workers, intellectuals, and professionals to stay at home in order to help Africa develop and become industrialized. Africa has to figure out a plan to avoid pushing their own people away, since there are multiple factors that are pulling them away to distant areas. If Africa was able to have similar incentives as foreign places, fewer people would leave, and that would help Africa develop. People who leave negatively affect their own families, as well as all of the people in their homeland. Difficulty supporting those who are left behind, and the overall idea of staying united as a country, are problems that Africans face. The consequences of “brain drain” threaten to stunt the overall development of the continent. People should not be leaving...
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...NATIONAL OPEN UNIVERSITY OF NIGERIA SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SOCIAL SCIENCE COURSE CODE:POL 122 COURSE TITLE:INTRODUCTION TO AFRICAN POLITICS POL 122 INTRODUCTION TO AFRICAN POLITICS COURSE GUIDE POL 122 INTRODUCTION TO AFRICAN POLITICS Course Writer/Developer Mr. Sikiru Lanre Nurudeen Department of Political Science and Conflict Resolution Al – Hikmah University, Ilorin Kwara State Course Editor Prof. M. Olarotimi Ajayi Faculty of Social Sciences Covenant University Otta Course Coordinator Mr. Abdul-Rahoof A. Bello National Open University of Nigeria ii POL 122 INTRODUCTION TO AFRICAN POLITICS NATIONAL OPEN UNIVERSITY OF NIGERIA National Open University of Nigeria Headquarters 14/16 Ahmadu Bello Way Victoria Island Lagos Abuja Office No. 5 Dar es Salaam Street Off Aminu Kano Crescent Wuse II, Abuja Nigeria e-mail: centralinfo@nou.edu.ng URL: www.nou.edu.ng Published by National Open University of Nigeria Printed 2009 ISBN: 978-058-415-3 All Rights Reserved iii POL 122 INTRODUCTION TO AFRICAN POLITICS CONTENTS PAGE Introduction ………………………………………….…………… 1 Course Aims ……………………………………………………… 1 Course Objectives ………………………………………………... 1 Working through Course……………………………………. This 2 Course Materials………………………………………………….. 2 Study Units………………………………………………………. . 2 Text books and References……………………………………….. 3 Assessment File…………………………………………………… 3 Tutor-Marked Assignment ……………………….. ……………… 4 iv POL 122 INTRODUCTION TO AFRICAN POLITICS Final Examination Grading…………………………………...
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...navy has 12 aircraft carriers and 70 submarines. It is the most powerful military machine on Earth. It established a ring of bases to surround the USSR in the Cold War era, as part of its policy of containment. The Iraq war saw the USA effectively “go it alone.” • Some economic power is direct. The USA plays a major role in world trade, much of which is conducted in $. The US $ is the world’s reserve currency. • A key area of US international prestige since the 1960s has been the exploration of space. 1969 saw men on the moon. The USA aims to build a moon base by 2020 and visit Mars by 2037. Exercise of indirect power • Neo-colonialism (term coined by Kwame Nkrumah, first president of Ghana) is a form of indirect control over developing counties, most of them former colonies. Has neo-colonialism prevented any real development progress in the 40 years since colonies gained their independence? Africa could lead us to say yes. India could lead us to say no. • Some people say the IGOs were set up by superpowers for superpowers. The IMF was set up in 1944. It has its headquarters in Washington. Counties wishing to have their debt relieved have to apply Western economic policies devised by the World Bank and the IMF. This means they lose some of their economic sovereignty. • Global economic and political power is in the hands of a small number of players in the form of IGOs. The USA is a member of the G7, the G8, the UN Security Council...
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...The Negative Effects of Indirect Rule on Africans Indirect rule was a system of ruling Africans that sought not to displace African authority, but instead to rule through it. It was first used by the British and later adopted by other European powers after they witnessed its success. Indirect rule is largely considered a more humane alternative to its counterpart, direct rule, which placed colonial powers in charge of all aspects of African administration. Despite this, there were numerous problems with indirect rule in both theory and in practice. Ultimately, indirect rule was hopelessly flawed. In 1922, F.D. Lugard, a colonial officer in Uganda and later Nigeria who came up with the idea of using indirect rule in Africa, published a book titled Dual Mandate in Tropical Africa. In it, he advocated leaving management of African colonies to Africans, subject to the laws of policies of the British colonial staff. He took this position in part because he believed that European culture could not be adopted by Africans, because they were an inferior people (Lugard 76). This is an extraordinary weakness of the theoretical foundations of indirect rule, as Africans have adapted to European society remarkably well in modern times. A theory of governance based on the idea that Africans were innately inferior made the entire approach flawed from the onset. Mahmood Mamdani, who likened indirect rule to “decentralized despotism,” argued that “The central claim of indirect rule…...
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