ABSTRACT
It has become a commonplace in the analysis of Africa’s experience since 1990 to contend that the ending of the Cold War brought an era of greater conflict to the continent.1 It is easy to see why such an idea prevails. Genocide in Rwanda in 1994, as well as the Great Congo War that followed, was undoubtedly the most devastatingly destructive armed struggle ever seen in Africa, the reverberations of which continue to destabilise the Great Lakes region some two decades on.2 The collapse of Somalia in 1991, coming so speedily after the fall of the Berlin Wall, also reinforced the idea that removing the constraints of Cold War alliances risked plunging Africa into multiple power struggles as factions vied for control and power in the ‘new’ post-nationalist order.3 By the closing years of the century, bloody civil wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone gave rise to similarly portentous analyses in West Africa,4 while in southern Africa, war had again flared in Angola amid fears that the country would be tipped into another prolonged resource conflict.5 While ‘weak states’ seemed most vulnerable amid the catastrophic changes of the 1990s, even the continent’s more stable countries, where civil
war and rebellion were avoided, saw upsurges of political violence as the push for the imposition of multiparty democracy and the liberalisation of the economy brought new kinds of political competition.6 By the end of the 1990s, Africa did indeed appear to be a continent in turmoil – and its cause was most widely believed to lie in the ending of the Cold War and the political reconfiguration this had brought.
