ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses Africa's critical contributions to and resolution of international peace and security issues. Using an International Relations (IR) approach, the chapter explains that sidelining Africa in IR discourses does not take adequate cognizance of the fact that 'Africanizing' IR thinking about the continent's contributions to peace and security provides a more nuanced and better understanding and appreciation of how approaches to international security also impact on and influence Africa. This is the growing discourse on African agency that is gradually permeating the field of international relations. Applying the ongoing Malian crisis as the empirical lens, the chapter posits that the process through which the international community 'securitized' is crisis and located it within the discourses on the 'war on terror' deserves careful analysis. Towards global security, African states have deployed military, police and civilian personnel to support United Nations (UN) peacekeeping operations in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cyprus, Haiti, Timor Leste and Lebanon, among others.
