ABSTRACT

The post-colonial state in Africa is the legacy of 500 years of evolution in the technology or the art of colonial governance. The African state was inorganic in origin and thus remains fundamentally alienated from African society. Africa may lack the very thing R2P requires for it to be operationalized successfully states, as people typically understand them. In this chapter the author have spoken of the stark divergence between the state of the global political imaginary, the classical model of the sovereign state, and the realities of politics in contemporary Africa. The author explores contemporary research on the state in Africa despite the difficulty of generalizing in such a diverse context in order to juxtapose the conditions of contemporary African statehood against the state of the global political imaginary, which is implicit in the Responsibility to Protect. The problem of African statehood explored here does not imply that R2P is irrelevant to Africa's crises of human protection.