ABSTRACT

Although the United Nations (UN) conducted one of its most costly and difficult Cold War missions in the Congo (1960–1964), it did not deploy another mission in Africa until 1988 when it sent peacekeepers to Angola to monitor the Cuban withdrawal. Since then, however, Africa has witnessed a huge increase in the number, size and complexity of peacekeeping operations. These operations proliferated in two senses: first, nearly twenty African states ended up hosting one or more of the approximately sixty different peacekeeping operations that were deployed between 1990 and 2009; second, a majority of African states became troop-contributing countries to one or more of those operations. Peacekeeping thus became a significant part of Africa's post-Cold War political landscape.