in Africa from 1990 to 2015, including the impact of outside intervention. See also Christopher Clapham, ed., African Guerrillas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998); Morten Bøås and Kevin C. Dunn, eds., African Guerrillas: Raging against the Machine (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2007); Morten Bøås and Kevin C. Dunn, eds., Africa’s Insurgents: Navigating an Evolving Landscape (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2017); Paul Richards, ed., No Peace, No War: An Anthropology of Contemporary Armed Conflicts (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005); and Preben Kaarsholm, ed., Violence, Political Culture and Development in Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006).
Several works examine African conflicts and peace agreements. Two companion volumes edited by Alfred Nhema and Paul Tiyambe Zeleza examine the causes of and possible solutions to African conflicts from African perspectives: The Roots of African Conflicts and The Resolution of African Conflicts (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008). Adebayo Oyebade and Abiodun Alao, eds., Africa after the Cold War: The Changing Perspectives on Security (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1998), assesses civil conflicts, economic crises, and environmental degradation as the primary threats to post–Cold War African security. Grace Maina and Erik Melander, eds., Peace Agreements and Durable Peace in Africa (Scottsville, South Africa: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2016), offers a framework for evaluating prospects for a successful accord. Case studies for Côte d’Ivoire, the DRC, Somalia, and Sudan are especially relevant. Séverine Autesserre, Peaceland: Conflict Resolution and the Everyday Politics of International Intervention (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), explains why international peace interventions often fail, scrutinizing the modes of thought and action that prevent foreign interveners from thinking outside the box. A sharp assessment of past failures and future prospects for democracy can be found in Nic Cheeseman, Democracy in Africa: Successes, Failures, and the Struggle for Political Reform (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
The post–World War II emphasis on human rights and humanitarian intervention is the focus of several works. Samantha Power, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 2002), analyzes six twentieth-century genocides and the US government’s failure to stop them. This study has been pivotal to recent debates on international law and human rights policies and had an important political impact on the Obama administration. Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), contends that post-1960s discontent with regimes established on the basis of utopian and anticolonial ideologies paved the way for human rights as a justification for international actions that challenged state sovereignty. Timothy Nunan, Humanitarian Invasion: Global Development in Cold War Afghanistan (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), argues that foreign intervention in Afghanistan during the Cold War and its aftermath became the model for future humanitarian interventions that destabilized societies and undermined national sovereignty in the Global South. Alex de Waal, “Writing Human Rights and Getting It Wrong,” Boston Review, June 6, 2016, casts a critical eye on humanitarian intervention lobbies, particularly those that focused on Somalia, Sudan, and Rwanda. He argues that their judgments were often ill-informed and reduced complex situations to straightforward narratives of heroes and villains; as a result, the military interventions they promoted sometimes did more harm than good. Carrie Booth Walling and Susan Waltz’s website, Human Rights Advocacy and the History of International Human Rights Standards (http://humanrightshistory.umich.edu/). It is especially useful for teachers, students, researchers, and advocates.
A number of works examine the reshaping of international legal principles and the struggle for global accountability. Two are central to discussions of the responsibility to protect: Francis M. Deng, Sadikiel Kimaro, Terrence Lyons, Donald Rothchild, and I. William Zartman, Sovereignty as Responsibility: Conflict Management in Africa (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1996); and Francis M. Deng, “From ‘Sovereignty as Responsibility’ to the Responsibility to Protect,” Global Responsibility to Protect 2, no. 4 (2010): 353–70. Elizabeth Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World: America’s Vision for Human Rights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), examines the role of New Deal visionaries in constructing the postwar international order that eroded the primacy of national sovereignty and strengthened the position of human rights.
Other works critique the new human rights/R2P discourse and international actions based on its principles. Robert Meister, After Evil: A Politics of Human Rights (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), argues that the democratic capitalist world has monopolized the concept of “human rights,” producing a version that does not challenge the structural inequalities that underlie poverty and oppression, and has used the responsibility to protect paradigm to justify militaristic ventures. Alex J. Bellamy and Paul D. Williams, “The New Politics of Protection? Côte d’Ivoire, Libya and the Responsibility to Protect,” International Affairs 87, no. 4 (July 2011): 825–50, explores the role of external powers and stakeholders in determining which civilians are to be protected. A critical assessment of the International Criminal Court and its uneven record in advancing global accountability can be found in David Bosco, Rough Justice: The International Criminal Court in a World of Power Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).
Two important works focus on the UN’s role in humanitarian intervention: Norrie MacQueen, Humanitarian Intervention and the United Nations (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), provides an overview of UN interventions in various world regions, including sub-Saharan Africa, and assesses their impact and moral implications. Carrie Booth Walling, All Necessary Measures: The United Nations and Humanitarian Intervention (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), investigates the ways in which human rights concerns have altered Security Council attitudes toward state sovereignty and explains the variation in UN response to violations.
The Cold War roots of international terrorist movements associated with Islam are explored in several texts. Three works investigate the CIA’s role in recruiting, training, and financing Muslim fighters to wage war against Soviet forces in Afghanistan; they also explore how Soviet-Afghan War veterans subsequently established worldwide terrorist networks, including al-Qaeda and its spinoff, the Islamic State. See John K. Cooley, Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism, 3rd ed. (Sterling, VA: Pluto Press, 2002); Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (New York: Penguin, 2004); and Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War and the Roots of Terror (New York: Pantheon, 2004). Jean-Pierre Filiu, From Deep State to Islamic State: The Arab Counter-Revolution and Its Jihadi Legacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), exposes the ways in which Arab autocracies quashed the Arab Spring uprisings by unleashing internal security, intelligence, and military forces, as well as street gangs and violent extremists. He argues that these actions opened the door to the Islamic State. The origins of the Islamic State are also examined in Joby Warrick, Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS (New York: Doubleday, 2015), which contends that the policies of the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations aided in the organization’s emergence and expansion.
Conceptions and misconceptions about Islamic fundamentalism, Islamism, and jihad are examined in a number of works. They include International Crisis Group, Understanding Islamism, Middle East/North Africa Report 37 (Cairo/Brussels: International Crisis Group, 2005); Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim (mentioned previously); and Martin Kramer, “Coming to Terms: Fundamentalists or Islamists?” Middle East Quarterly 10, no. 2 (Spring 2003): 65–77. Richard C. Martin and Abbas Barzegar, eds., Islamism: Contested Perspectives on Political Islam (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), presents diverse interpretations of Islamism by Muslim and non-Muslim intellectuals. Juan Cole, Engaging the Muslim World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), dispels misconceptions about various movements within Islam, distinguishing between extremists and Islamic fundamentalists who reject violence. John L. Esposito, Unholy War: Terror in the Name of Islam (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), contrasts the teachings of the Qur’an with their manipulation
