While noticeable signs of change in relations between France and her former colonies in Africa began to appear in the post-cold war era, particularly since 1990, elements of continuity include their enduring historical and cultural ties; their informal, intimate, and secretive politico-diplomatic relations, typified by the bi-annual franco-African summit meetings; and the fact that when all is said and done, the contintent remains of great economic importance to France. As for the gradual process of democratisation which has swept throughout francophone Africa in recent years, there is evidence that this has been selectively supported by France according to criteria pertaining more to her core foreign-policy interests in Africa than to ideological, legalistic, or humanitarian considerations.

The National Peacekeeping Force (NPKF) was designed to meet a serious security challenge anticipated in the run-up to South Africa's first democratic elections in April 1994. Its establishment was an imaginative and constructive, but ultimately disastrous initiative. Its failure – however inevitable in retrospect – constituted a major tragedy, less as it proved for the free and fair conduct of the elections than for the longer-term prospects of forging a truly national army. This study seeks to explore: (i) the genesis and evolution of the concept of an integrated South African peacekeeping force; (ii) its character, composition, command structure, and cohesion; and (iii) the causes and consequences of its fateful deployment on the volatile East Rand.

Anarchic tendencies in Chad serve as a cautionary example of what the on-going reconfiguration of Africa may entail. Interim institutions of government set up by a Sovereign National Conference, which was convened two years after the downfall of the despotic régime of Hissène Habré in December 1990, have generated deep disappointment. Democratisation has proceeded fitfully. The economy remains stagnant. Strikes in the public sector reflect the ‘social crisis’. Worst of all, the security situation has deteriorated substantially and the state is suffering from a severe lack of authority.

Fears that the supposedly sacred norm of non-intervention in the domestic affairs of other states has eroded in the last few years are not entirely groundless. Excuses to intervene, that now receive sanction by the Security Council of the United Nations, include humanitarian concerns, as in Somalia and Rwanda, international peace and security, as in Kuwait and Bosnia, and the denial of democracy, as in Haiti, all of which differ from the interventions of the cold war years. As Thomas Buergenthal has pointed out, ‘Once the rule of law, human rights and democratic pluralism are made the subject of international commitments, there is little left in terms of governmental institutions that is domestic.’

Events in Southern Africa during the early 1990s have re-opened a debate over the effectiveness of the Reagan Administration's policy of ‘Constructive Engagement’. This was a controversy that had previously been laid to rest with the US Congress passing its Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act in October 1986, since the ensuing punitive sanctions imposed by the enactment of this legislation scuttled Ronald Reagan's strategy of using friendly persuasion to encourage the South African Government away from its practice of apartheid. Yet, with hindsight, it may appear that the President's method of drawing the Pretoria regime into the international community, through offering recognition and encouragement in exchange for reform, has been triumphantly vindicated. After all, has not the African National Congress (ANC) come to power via a democratic process, thereby avoiding a bloodbath on the scale that so many had predicted?

The signing of the General Peace Agreement in Rome in October 1992 marked the formal cessation of 17 years of intermittent warfare in the former Portuguese colony of Mozambique.1 The bitter struggle by the guerrilla movement known as the Resistência Nacional Moçambicana (Renamo) to topple the avowedly Marxist–Leninist régime established by the leaders of the Frente de Libertção de Moçambique (Frelimo) was in many respects a regional expression of the cold war politics which dominated the international environment. The transformations in the Soviet Union and South Africa, blunting the ideological and logistical support which had fuelled the conflict, provoked a crisis for the protagonists. With over a million casualties, a greater number of refugees in neighbouring countries, and an economy devastated by war and mismanagement, the Government and Renamo at last sued for peace.2

Bullets rather than ballots have dominated politics in Uganda since independence, where two governments have been removed by coups, one by a foreign invasion, and another by an armed rebellion. Force has not only dominated the formal political system, but also threatened the economic and social basis on which democratic processes and progressive development depends. For 25 years predatory military rule and civil war have destroyed lives, skills, and assets, undermined institutional competence and accountability, caused widespread per sonal trauma, suppressed autonomous organisations in civil society, and intensified ethnic hostility and conflict. And Uganda is not alone in this – the middle of the twentieth century was dominated by fascism and war, while sectarian or ethnic conflicts in Bosnia, Ulster, Sri Lanka, Somalia, the Sudan, Angola, Liberia, Zaï, Burundi, and Rwanda have inflicted untold damage on people and property.1