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crises require not only a continuing emphasis on diplomacy but also resources for peacemaking and peacekeeping. And yet the Bush administration has bequeathed the new president a new military command for Africa (the United States Africa Command, known as AFRICOM). Meanwhile, Washington has starved the United Nations and other multilateral institutions of resources, even while entrusting them with enormous peacekeeping responsibilities.

In a briefing for European Command officers in March 2004, Whelan said that the Pentagon's priorities in Africa were to "prevent establishment of/disrupt/destroy terrorist groups; stop the spread of weapons of mass destruction; perform evacuations of U.S. citizens in danger; assure access to strategic resources, lines of communication, and refueling/forward sites"

On February 19, 2008, Moeller told an AFRICOM conference that protecting "the free flow of natural resources from Africa to the global market" was one of AFRICOM's "guiding principles," citing "oil disruption," "terrorism," and the "growing influence" of China as major "challenges" to U.S. interests in Africa.

Somalia provided a textbook case of the negative results of "aggregating" local threats into an undifferentiated concept of global terrorism. It has left the new Obama administration with what Ken Menkhaus, a leading academic expert on Somalia, called "a policy nightmare."

These operations illustrate how strengthening counterinsurgency capacity proves either counterproductive or irrelevant as a response to African security issues, which may include real links to global terrorist networks but are for the most part focused on specific national and local realities. On an international scale, the impact of violent Islamic extremism in North Africa has direct implications in Europe, but its bases are urban communities and the North African Diaspora in Europe, rather than the Sahara-Sahel hinterland.

In March 2004, P-3 aircraft from this squadron and reportedly operating from the southern Algerian base at Tamanrasset were deployed to monitor and gather intelligence on the movements of Algerian Salafist guerrillas operating in Chad and to pass on this intelligence to Chadian forces engaged in combat against the guerrillas. In September 2007, an American C-130 "Hercules" cargo plane stationed in Bamako, the capital of Mali, as part of the Flintlock 2007 exercises, was deployed to resupply Malian counter-insurgency units engaged in fighting with Tuareg forces and was hit by Tuareg ground fire. No U.S. personnel were injured and the plane returned safely to the capital, but the incident signaled a significant extension of the U.S. role in counter-insurgency warfare in the region.

In the case of Mali, Robert Pringle — a former U.S. ambassador to that country — has noted that the U.S. emphasis on anti-terrorism and radical Islam is out of touch with both the country's history and Malian perceptions of current threats to their own security.

The threats cited by U.S. officials to justify AFRICOM aren't imaginary. Global terrorist networks do seek allies and recruits throughout the African continent, with potential impact in the Middle East, Europe, and even North America as well as in Africa. In the Niger Delta, the production of oil has been repeatedly interrupted by attacks by militants of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND). More broadly, insecurity creates a environment vulnerable to piracy and to the drug trade, as well as to motivating potential recruits to extremist political violence. It doesn't follow, however, that such threats can be effectively countered by increased U.S. military engagement, even if the direct involvement of U.S. troops is minimized.

Finding the best way forward in responding to crises or to Africa's structural problems, must go beyond the top. Africa's resources for change and for leadership are also found in civil society, among respected retired leaders and other elders, and among professionals working both in governments and in multilateral organizations, including both diplomats and military professionals. The challenge for U.S. policy is to engage actively and productively in responding to crises, bringing U.S. resources to bear without assuming that it is either possible or wise for the United States to dominate.

Although he prefaced his list of priorities with a reference to support for ending conflict in Africa and "African solutions to African problems," it's telling that the description of the security priority includes military capacity-building and AFRICOM operations, but no mention at all of diplomacy. Such indications do not give great confidence in any major shift in security strategy. Nevertheless, there are also signals that U.S. officials, including some in the military and intelligence community, do recognize the need to give greater emphasis to diplomacy and development. The initial U.S. welcome to the election of moderate Islamist Sheikh Sharif Ahmed as president of Somalia is potentially an indicator of a new approach to that complex crisis.

In contrast to the emphasis on building bilateral U.S. military ties with Africa, being institutionalized in AFRICOM, U.S. security policy toward Africa should instead concentrate on building institutional capacity within the United Nations, as well as coordinating U.S. relationships with African regional institutions with United Nations capacity-building programs.

The new president's popularity and the range of domestic and global problems he faces are likely to give the administration a large window of opportunity before disillusionment sets in.

U.S. proxies set off inter-communal bloodletting in Rwanda in 1994, a conflagration that served as pretext for Rwandan and Ugandan invasion of the mineral-rich Democratic Republic of Congo and the loss of six million lives – all under the protection, funding and guidance of a succession of U.S. administrations in mock atonement for the much smaller “genocide” in Rwanda.

New age Euro-American law holds sway over Africa in the form of the International Criminal Court. The Court’s dockets are reserved for Africans, whose supposed civilizational deficits monopolize the global judiciary’s resources. This, too, is R2P, in robes.

However, what we do know about U.S. domestic “terror” spying is enough to dismiss the whole premise for the NSA’s vast algorithmic enterprises. The actual “terrorist” threat on U.S. soil is clearly relatively slight. Otherwise, why would the FBI have to manufacture homegrown jihadists by staging elaborate stings of homeless Black men in Miami who couldn’t put together bus fare to Chicago, much less bomb the Sears tower?

So, what are they looking for? Patterns. Patterns of thought and behavior that algorithmically reveal the existence of cohorts of people that might, as a group, or a living network, create problems for the State in the future. People who do not necessarily know each other, but whose patterns of life make them potentially problematic to the rulers, possibly in some future crisis, or some future manufactured crisis. A propensity to dissent, for example. The size of these suspect cohorts, these pattern-based groups, can be as large or small as the defining criteria inputted by the programmer. So, what kind of Americans would the programmers be interested in?

The continent-wide Resource Curse makes the Marikana massacre look like a picnic, and allows us to dismiss Spector’s article as the kind of idle spin-doctoring fluff one gets from the State Department’s US Information Service (his former employer). But that is not a particularly satisfying place to leave matters, for the broader assumptions about the US in Africa also need a rethink, in part because South Africa is hosting the BRICS summit in Durban next March, and we’re being subjected to rhetoric from Pretoria about a ‘new dynamic’ in the emerging market power bloc, supposedly challenging the sole-superpower system of global governance.

Thanks to White House patronage, murderous African dictators still retain power until too late, most obviously Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, who is personally worth at least $40 billion (according to an ABC News report) and who was recipient of many billions of dollars in US military aid in the 18 months following Obama’s speech. As Carson’s boss Hillary Clinton remarked in 2009, ‘I really consider President and Mrs. Mubarak to be friends of my family,’

Amongst the 40 were Cameroonian dictator Paul Biya, and as his office reported, ‘At the end of the two and half hours that they spent together, most of the African leaders left the dining hall visibly satisfied.’

also have some sort of response should they not heed these warnings not to proceed?,’ the official answer was chilling: ‘I think we haven’t telegraphed any response at this point.’ One reason not to annoy Jammeh was the US Central Intelligence Agency’s reliance upon a Banjul airport as a secret destination and refueling site for ‘rendition’ victims, that is, the illegal transfer of suspected terrorists to countries carrying out torture on behalf of Washington.

former US National Security Council official John Prendergast’s concern about ‘a vexing policy quandary’ in Washington’s relations with Ethiopia, Rwanda, Uganda and South Sudan: ‘All of them have served American interests or have a strong US constituency, but all have deeply troubling human rights records.’ (Whether this is a ‘vexing quandary’ or instead best described as a time-honoured tradition is up to the reader to decide.)

why launch this latest enterprise of dubious value? Well, when you have created an AfriCom, when you have staffed it with a few thousand personnel, when you have a Special Forces corps numbering 60,000, when you have a vastly expanded CIA Operations Division, and when American strategic thinking is still locked in the auto-pilot mode set in September 2001 – when all these forces are at work, there will be action.’

within a few months, that the Central Intelligence Agency was extremely active in Somalia and that mercenaries (such as Bancroft Global Development) were Washington’s hired guns, as Carson admitted to the New York Times, ‘We do not want an American footprint or boot on the ground.’ Hence, according to The Times, drones were used against the Shabab (Al-Qaeda’s allies in Somalia).

The 2006 invasion of Somalia by the Ethiopian forces was clearly a proxy war, with AfriCom providing the logistics-allowing a criminal organization like al-Shabab to claim a legitimate reason for its war and brutal terror against the very people both sides claim to be freeing: the poor ordinary Somalis.’

On two occasions (1994 and 1996) I worked in the office of a man officially labeled a ‘terrorist’, a South African targeted by the CIA in the early 1960s and only taken off the US State Department’s no-entry ‘terror watch-list’ in July 2008 (!) thanks to a formal Congressional intervention.

As WikiLeaks demonstrated, Washington is choc full of pathological hypocrites.

Another source of oil disruption in Nigeria of concern to Washington was a civil society case against Shell Oil in May 2012 in which Shell argued it should have no human rights liabilities because of its corporate status, a position that the US rejected when it came to US citizens’ rights to sue. ‘But when the Supreme Court ordered a rehearing in the case, and asked whether human rights lawsuits could be brought when the abuses happened outside the US,’ according to EarthRights International’s Marco Simons, Washington actually sided with Shell. ‘Obama is saying that if a foreign government abuses human rights, we can bomb them, like we did with Libya. But we can't hold anyone accountable in court, because that would threaten international relations.’

That means wherever there is socio-ecological, religious and economic pressure, such as Uganda and Somalia, Washington’s instinct is the iron fist, followed by denialism and ‘goo-goo’ good-governance rhetoric. ‘From Carson's presentations two years in a row at the annual African Studies Association meetings, most of us felt we heard the same speeches we heard in the Bush Administration,’ says Wiley.

Horn’s evidence is not only that Kony has not been seen for years in Uganda, but that Obama also ‘quietly waived restrictions on military aid to Chad, Yemen, Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo’ even though their armies all have recent documented records of recruiting child soldiers.

Indeed, it is appropriate to ask why backwardness prevails in countries that are only ‘useful’ insofar as they have resources. Of course, oil and minerals are not Washington’s only economic objective. As WikiLeaks revealed after a February 2010 meeting with Ethiopian dictator Meles Zenawi, ‘Carson encouraged Meles to hasten steps to liberalize the telecommunications and banking industries in Ethiopia,’ according to the secret State Department cable. An additional economic objective, also revealed at that meeting, was the destruction of the Kyoto Protocol’s binding cap on greenhouse gas emissions, a project that Obama and the heads of Brazil, China, India and South Africa agreed to in Copenhagen at a UN climate summit in December 2009. As WikiLeaks demonstrated, much diplomacy in subsequent weeks was aimed at achieving buy-in even if that entailed bribery and coercion.

with Obama half-Kenyan by ancestry (a factor regularly raised by right-wing commentators who even make ridiculous claims as to the land of his birth), this treatment should not be considered as specifically anti-African; instead, it is best described as pro-corporate. For Washington’s whacking of Africa is not so different than the whacks its rulers give everywhere.

further information has become available about former constitutional law professor Obama’s personal role in civilian-killing drone warfare (including US citizen victims), cyberterrorism, warrantless eavesdropping, suppression of civil liberties, lack of transparency and other apparent contradictions. However, do these contradictions represent, as Prendergast put it, a vexing quandary – or instead, a tradition?

according to American University professor Sean Flynn, Obama ‘endorsed a set of policy proposals in its trade negotiations with developing countries that is much worse for access to medicine concerns than those of any other past administration.’

Africa and so many other examples show how the Obama Administration has become a rotten fusion of the worst instincts within neoliberalism and neoconservatism. I hope that on November 6, he soundly defeats Mitt Romney, who is worse on all counts except the ability to huckster people in Africa that Washington acts in their interests.

Last year, citing US national security interests, Obama issued a waiver so as to send more than $200 million in military aid to US-allied regimes in Somalia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Libya, South Sudan and Yemen in spite of a 2008 US law prohibiting such funding because of their armies’ recruitment of child soldiers. According to Human Rights Watch’s Jo Becker, ‘The Obama administration has been unwilling to make even small cuts to military assistance to governments exploiting children as soldiers. Children are paying the price for its poor leadership.’

The so-called “terrorist” groups, like Ansar al-Din, al-Tawhid wa al-Jihad and AQIM, only moved in after the Tuareg Movement for the National Liberation of Azawed had expelled the Malian army from the north and declared a separate country.

“Whatever the motivation of the principle NATO belligerents [in ousting Gadaffi], the law of unintended consequences is exacting a heavy toll on Mali today,” former UN regional envoy Robert Fowler told the Guardian (UK) “and will continue to do so throughout the Sahel as the vast store of Libyan weapons spreads across this, one of the most unstable regions of the world.”

Hundreds of millions of dollars in aid is being directed at fighting terrorism on the continent, and the US military is training the armed forces of dozens of African nations.  A Malian army captain used that aid and training to pull off a coup that now threatens to turn into a regional war.

Gen. Hogg says AFRICOM’s mission is to combat famine and disease. Yet, the AFRICOM-assisted Ethiopian invasion of Somalia in late 2006 led to “the worst humanitarian crisis in Africa – worse than Darfur,” according to United Nations observers. The 2007 humanitarian crisis and the escalating U.S.-directed war against Somalia made the 2010 famine all but inevitable.

Its one drone base in Niamey, Niger can cover most of West Africa–and North Africa is covered by drones operating from Sicily–but there are gaps, notably around Senegal and Chad.

AFRICOM and its allies are testing an open-ended, “light-touch” approach, with few boots-on-the-ground and a reliance on special forces, drones and private military companies. 

Increased ISR capabilities have also depended on use of private military and security contractors (PMSCs), who have run key elements of AFRICOM’s covert counter-terrorism operations in the region. Using unmarked, civilian-registered aircraft, they provide ISR operations, transport special operations forces, and provide medical evacuation and search and rescue capacities.

But it is France–the old colonial power, Saharan gendarme or legionnaire–that has most at stake in the Sahel-Sahara and on which the US so-far depends. Last week, France formally redeployed its military forces under Opération Barkhane, which sees French land, air and special forces establish an indefinite regional presence at eight bases and several other forward operating locations across five or more Sahel states. US forces and aircraft have a presence at least three of these bases (Niamey, N’Djamena and Ouagadougou) and probably use several others for “contingencies”.

Just as there is little mention of this rapidly expanding presence, so too is there little discussion of the effectiveness of this new approach to counterterrorism and the impact it will have on stability, governance, and accountability in a fragile region.

The US has made sure this week not to be seen to engage with selected authoritarian African regimes, withholding invitations to Sudan’s ICC indicted Omar el Bashir, Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe and Eritrea’s Somalia-meddling Isaias Afewerki. Yet, in a nod to similarly uncritical alliances of the Cold War era, its expanding military engagement across Africa has depended on relationships with similarly dubious governments. Djibouti, Uganda and Ethiopia, the increasingly undemocratic pillars of US campaigns against Somalia’s al-Qaida franchise, are the most blatant examples.

Outside of the limits of this week’s summit, the trend towards covert or “plausibly deniable” counter-terrorism–PMSCs, drones, rapid reaction special forces–and barely restrained mandates to wage war is indicative of the real and increasing power over Africa policy exercised by Defense departments in both Washington and Paris.

The elected Malian government seems to have interpreted its post-2013 French and UN guarantees of security enforcement as reason not to pursue a peace process with northern separatists. Similarly, Côte d’Ivoire’s President Alassane Ouattara has shown no urgency in seeking reconciliation with supporters of the former regime since French and UN troops helped him to power in 2011. Governance, human rights and non-military solutions to existing conflict are thus considerably undermined by the securitisation of policy in the Sahel-Sahara.

Instead, the U.S. established “Africa Command” (AFRICOM) in 2007, and has since built three Predator drone bases in the Republic of Seychelles, Ethiopia and most recently Niger, along with a forward operating base in Kenya. Army General David Rodriquez recently said that the U.S. needs a 15-fold increase in “additional intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities … to protect American interests and assist our close allies and partners.”

Only a massive, class-conscious movement that crosses borders and defends the rights and needs of all ethnic and cultural minorities can rally and integrate the working people, farmers and nomads of Africa to counteract their foreign and domestic dictators.

In Somalia, the CIA and AFRICOM have been involved in propping up the Ethiopian occupation and the latter Transitional Federal Government regime since 2006. The African Union Mission to Somalia, AMISOM, is largely a U.S.-controlled military operation which is financed by Washington and provided with political, intelligence and diplomatic cover. Somalia is the source of oil and other strategic interests for imperialism and both the U.S. and NATO have large-scale naval vessels off the coast of the Horn of Africa nation in the Gulf of Aden.

The presence of U.S. military and intelligence forces in Africa is designed to bolster the strategic mineral and territorial interests of Wall Street. Africa is now supplying greater amounts of oil, natural gas and other essential minerals to economic interests of the ruling class.

The advent of regional blocs such as the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) has served to provide the African Union member-states with both economic and political alliances that are outside U.S. and European Union influence. In regard to China, the socialist state has provided direct economic trade and development assistance which is far superior to the traditional relations established by the imperialist countries which enslaved Africans and colonized the continent for centuries.

The Africa-South America Summit has held three gatherings, the latest of which was in March, in order to enhance cooperation and to form a bloc against U.S. efforts to undermine anti-imperialist governments in Latin America and developing relations between Africa and non-Western regional entities. Iran has also strengthened its relations with Africa and Latin America causing serious concerns on the part of the U.S.

The joining by the Republic of South Africa of the Brazil, Russia, India, China (BRICS) grouping has resulted in new initiatives being discussed including the creation of a development bank as well as independent foreign policy positions on Syria and Iran that are at variance with U.S. imperialism.

The nervousness and anxiety of the West over the future of the U.S. financial dominance was quite clear from the communique issued after the recent 2013 G8 meeting in Ireland. Most of the points in the communique issued by the White House (the Lough Erne Declaration) dealt with the challenges coming out of Africa and the role of transnational corporations plundering African resources without paying taxes.[8] Prior to the G8 meeting, the 2013 Report of the Africa Progress Panel headed by former Secretary General of the United Nations, Kofi Anan, called on the same G8 leaders to police their corporations. The Panel had called for inter alia:

The destructive extraction of resources from Africa is old and has taken new forms, as Patrick Bond reminds us in Looting Africa: The Economics of Exploitation.[10] For the past six decades the World Bank domination of economic arrangements in Africa has seen the period of dramatic capital flight from Africa.[11]

The multi-billion dollar enterprise of looting Africa was at the foundation of an international system that increasingly worked on the basis of speculative capital. The World Bank and the IMF understood that the real foundations of actual resources were to be found in Africa. To conceal the looting and plunder, the West disguised the reality that Africa is a net creditor to the advanced capitalist countries (termed “donors” in neo-liberal parlance). For this reason (and to perpetuate the myths of “spurring economic growth and investment”), the United States government has been caught in a losing battle where new rising forces such as Brazil, Russia, India, China, Turkey, South Korea and other states offer alternatives to the structural adjustment and austerity packages.

The fallout from the Libyan intervention has created insecurity and violence in all parts of North Africa and the Sahel, with racist elements within this Libyan uprising persecuting Africans as mercenaries.

From the writers in the US academic establishment, the NATO intervention was a success. [14] However, decent peoples in all parts of the world have been outraged by the continued violence and the support for the murderous militias by Turkey, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia. The persecution of the citizens of Tawergha stands as a permanent repudiation to the NATO intervention in Libya.

The previous justifications for US engagement had been part of the logic for the establishment of the US Africa Command. For a while there was the fiction that the United States was supporting growth and trade (via the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA)), but the militarization of the engagement with Africa intensified after then Vice President Dick Cheney’s energy task force had designated African petroleum as “strategic” and colluded with Donald Rumsfeld to establish the Africa Command (AFRICOM).

In June 2012, the White House issued a new policy statement on Africa. What was striking about this new White House Statement was that there was no mention of the US Africa Command. The document was titled, “Policy towards Sub-Saharan Africa.”[16] Many Africans did not pay much attention to this old ruse of seeking to divide Africa between so called sub- Saharan Africa and North Africa. The reality of the African Union is something that the US policy makers do not want to recognize; hence the State Department maintains the nomenclature of sub-Sahara Africa.

When John Kerry spoke at the 50th anniversary of African Unity in Addis Ababa in May 2013, the U.S. Secretary of State did not mention the U.S. Africa Command or the War on Terror. Instead John Kerry spoke of the fact that his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, was part of the anti-apartheid struggles in Southern Africa when she was a student at the University of Witwatersrand.

While there are no funds to support educational exchange, in the week of June 19, 2013, the US Senate under the initiative of Republican Senator James Inhofe authorized, “the Department of Defense to obligate up to $90 million to provide logistical support to the national military forces of Uganda to mitigate or eliminate the threat posed by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and bring an end to the murderous campaign of LRA leader Joseph Kony.”[18] This clear support of the conservatives in the United States for the Yoweri Museveni government in Kampala, under the guise of fighting Kony, comes at a moment when the Museveni leadership is being challenged, even from its own officer corps. [19] More importantly, Republican Senator James Inhofe and the conservatives who initiated this new authorization are bent on supporting a regime where there are elements who believe that same-gender loving persons should be put to death.

When U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder was testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee about the corruption of the banks he stated, “I am concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them.” Prosecutors, he said, must confront the problem that “if you do prosecute, if you do bring a criminal charge, it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy. And I think that is a function of the fact that some of these institutions have become too large.”[21]

When Obama entered the White House in January 2009, Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner advised him that prosecuting the banks would have a negative impact on the world economy.

Gary Yonge in the Guardian made the excellent argument in pointing out that Barack Obama is the Commander in Chief of the United States and is captive to US imperial power. In the article titled, “Is Obama Worse than Bush? That's Beside the Point,”[22] Yonge traced the statements of Obama the candidate to the realities of Obama as the President of the United States. His argument, that it is beside the point whether Obama is worse than Bush, is worth considering in light of the reality that the capitalist crisis facing the United States is far worse than when Bush was President 2001-2009. I will agree that the conditions of the repressive nature of the state have intensified in the midst of the global insecurity of capital, but where I would differ with Yonge would be for the progressive forces to intensify the efforts to hold the bankers accountable so that the militarists and the bankers do not take the world into other military catastrophes.

Recently, Obama appointed Susan Rice as the National Security Adviser. Rice had been groomed in anti-communism by the Madeline Albright and Clinton factions of the establishment. When Susan Rice was student at Oxford in the 1980s, she reputedly looked the other way when students such as Tajudeen Abdul Raheem were opposing apartheid. She was a member of the ignominious Bill Clinton national security team that pressured the United Nations not to intervene at the time of the Rwanda genocide in 1994.

Since those two journeys in June and July 2009, Obama has had to hide his understanding of Africa because he has been faced with a racist group called the Birthers who claim that he was born in Kenya and is therefore illegitimate as a President. There is another strong constituency that alleges that Obama is a Muslim. Obama can rightly claim his Irish heritage from his mother’s side, but is mortally afraid of making any statement that may suggest that he is familiar with the political struggles in Africa.

We know from the book by Richard Wolffe, Renegade: The Making of a President, that during the height of the Democratic Party primary battles in Iowa in January 2008, Obama had invited his sister, Auma Obama, to Iowa so that he could be kept abreast of the social forces behind the violence in Kenya at the time. When he drove around Iowa, his sister was briefing him on the issues that sparked the opposition to the theft of the elections. While preoccupied with the Iowa caucuses he was calling Kenya, reaching out to Desmond Tutu and taking an active role in seeking an end to the incredible violence that took hundreds of lives.[24] Since 2009 the Kenyans have been building a massive airport at Kisumu so that Air Force One could land in Western Kenya. This was in anticipation of the visit of Obama to visit his relatives. All of the planning for a Kenyan visit has had to be put on hold because of the outstanding questions of the initiators of the chilling violence that overtook Kenya in January 2008. Obama has instead opted to visit neighboring Tanzania.

Col. Lawrence Wilkerson has stated more than once that the arming of Syrian rebels will be a backdoor to the war against Iran.[27]

The Obama administration has been trapped by the history and practices of financial industry, the military intelligence corporations and the petroleum companies. From very early in 2009, the Obama administration understood that financial innovation was not socially valuable.

Those conjuring the “stress tests” are quite aware of the scholarly output as well as the activists who are now standing up for Africa.[31]

Official statements from the US Africa Command about peacekeeping and humanitarianism in Africa have been silent on the warfare and plunder in the Eastern Congo where the military allies of the United States, Rwanda and Uganda have been indicted for looting the natural resources of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This week John Kerry as the Secretary of State appointed former Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin as the Special Envoy to the DRC.

The legacies of enslavement, colonialism and apartheid dominate the social landscape in Africa. Recent scholarship on the health impacts of enslavement have pointed out the contemporary health questions in the African community in the West that emanate directly from slavery. [33] Harriet Washington in the excellent book, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present [34] has deepened our understanding of how many of the health practices of contemporary western medicine can be traced back to the era of enslavement.

In those fifty years, the US undermined the processes of self-determination, supported the apartheid regimes in Southern Africa (Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwe along with the Portuguese colonial forces in Angola and Mozambique), supported Jonas Savimbi for over twenty years, intervened in Somalia, destabilized the DRC by supporting Mobutu Sese Seko or thirty years, and most recently supported NATO to create havoc in Libya. At the most recent meeting of the African Union in Addis Ababa in May 2013, there were clear statements from the grassroots for the immediate unification of Africa. The confidence of the Global Pan African Family was clearly on display. The Obama administration understands the deep desires for change in Africa. Many of the current leaders who occupy office in Africa are teetering on the brink of extinction. There must be a break from the old US policy towards Africa that propped up tyrants and looters. While the media is complaining about the cost of the trip, the progressive intellectuals and activists in the US and in Africa must organize to oppose militarism and plunder in Africa. This is an inopportune moment for Obama to travel to Africa unless he is going to repudiate the growing police state that he is supervising. The mainstream establishment of the United States of America has nothing substantial other than militarism to offer Africa. This trip to Africa is a PR effort to solidify his legacy and garner waning support from his base in the United States.

State-building and nation-building in Liberia cannot be fully operationalized without an interrogation of the meaning of citizenship, given that the nation-state of Liberia is fundamentally de-territorialized, with a sizeable number of Liberians scattered throughout the globe, yet still fully engaged as transnational beings. My article scrutinizes the markers of citizenship, narrowly defined in Liberia’s current Aliens and Nationality Law.

Of course, Liberia’s history predates black settlement, with Liberian academics like Dr. Carl Patrick Burrowes challenging secondary sources that paint the country as a nation muddled in dichotomies without references to primary sources about indigenous life (Burrowes, 1989: 59).

Liberia was ruled from 1847-1980 by the True Whig Party (TWP), an oligarchy of descendants of black settlers. During this time, the country flourished as an outpost for black migration, with migrants from other parts of Africa and the Caribbean flocking to the ‘land of liberty.’

President Doe generated a hefty aid package of US$500 million between 1980 and 1988 from the U.S. government in exchange for Cold War loyalties (Huband, 1998: 35). Liberian exiles in the United States, led by former Interim Government of National Unity (IGNU) President Amos Sawyer and current Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, lobbied against Doe’s authoritarian rule through the Association of Constitutional Democracy (ACDL), but their cries for regime change fell on deaf ears (Huband, 1998: 47).

From 2003-2005, an interim government was established to pave the way for elections in 2005 in which Africa’s first female president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, was elected. It is worth noting that the leading three presidential candidates—Johnson Sirleaf, George Weah, Charles Brumskine—were all once diasporic Liberians (Liberian National Elections Commission, 2005).

It is rumored that many high-level political appointees hold foreign passports, though Liberia’s Aliens and Nationality Law is very clear about the automatic revocation of citizenship status upon naturalization elsewhere (Sieh, 2012).

The fact that President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf has been the only African head of state to publicly welcome AFRICOM is indicative of her transnational loyalties to the United States that some argue was born out of her experiences in the high-powered walls of institutions such as the World Bank and the United Nations.

Despite public relations campaigns and the forecasts of transformation, most of Johnson-Sirleaf’s first-term development milestones have been mired by challenges and critiques, one of which is the overemphasis on state-building at the expense of nation-building.

African governments have increasingly factored diasporas into domestic development projects, state-building, and nation-building exercises. This explicit acknowledgment of diasporas as transnational communities has manifested in legal instruments such as dual citizenship. Within the last decade alone, over one third of African countries have expanded constitutional reforms to grant dual citizenship to their diasporas, including, but not limited to: Angola, Botswana, Burundi, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, Sao Tome and Principe, Senegal, Sierra Leone, South Africa and Uganda. Liberia introduced its own dual citizenship legislation in 2008.

Although Liberia did not experience European colonialism, it can be proven empirically that black settler colonialism mirrored the direct rule policies of the French or the Boers. That indigenous males and female Liberians were not granted citizenship until the mid-20th century illustrates how citizenship within Liberia has always been a tool of exclusion and privilege rather than an automatic entitlement.

Denying a person citizenship because his/her father did not reside in Liberia prior to their birth discriminates against children whose fathers fled Liberia during the civil war, a major point of contention for Liberians abroad who advocate for dual citizenship.

Rapid international migration and mobility, coupled with globalization, have ruptured state-centric conceptions of citizenship, identity, and belonging (Sassen, 2005; Jacobson, 1996), with legal scholars now asserting that dual citizenship (or multiple citizenships) are becoming the rule rather than the exception in the 21st century (Spiro, 1997; Rubenstein & Adler, 2000). Therefore, an interrogation of Liberia’s proposed dual citizenship legislation and the renewal of debates about diasporic involvement in post-conflict state-building and nation-building cannot be meaningful without an analytical review of how the concept of citizenship has evolved in the modern world over time.

Using case studies from Senegal, Ghana, and Kenya, Whitaker argues that increased claims for dual citizenship in Africa may be driven as much by self-serving political interests as it is by concerns about national reconstruction, economic development, or security, especially with the advent of multi-party competition, the involvement of emigrants in homeland politics, and the need for African politicians to establish constituencies abroad for support and funding (Whitaker, 2011: 756).

There is no empirical basis for claiming that dual citizenship necessarily enforces homeland-emigrant ties, rather dual citizenship simply enables “external populations to secure citizenship in their places of external residence without relinquishing the material and sentimental advantages of retained original citizenship” (Spiro, 2012: 319).

Scholars who examine post-conflict reconstruction projects place a high premium on state-building, but less of an emphasis on its distant analytical twin, nation-building. A number of features defining state-building and nation-building position the two in binary trajectories. While nation-building is ‘people centric’ and domestically driven, requiring national agency, ownership and resources, state-building is ‘institution centric’ and externally driven, often soliciting international resources and involving some form of social engineering through a ‘one-size-fits’ all approach. Although both state-building and nation-building have their advantages and disadvantages, the two processes cannot be transformational if they are pursued in isolation. The Liberia case study has shown that policy makers must consider state-building and nation-building as mutually constitutive.

ive major contributions supporting the need to strengthen state institutions and governance structures in war to peace transitions were proffered in 2004 by authors such as Francis Fukuyama, Simon Chesterman, James Fearon and David Laitin, Stephen Krasner, and Roland Paris, which transformed state-building into a growing topic of concern in peace-building scholarship (Paris and Sisk, 2010: 7-10).

Legislation introduced in Liberia and other emerging countries in the Global South to extend citizenship to nationals abroad is a trend that has far reaching implications beyond the modern nation-state. Given that citizenship has been a site of contestation in Liberia because of its multiple meanings and contemporary manifestations, it is important to critically analyze how the enactment of dual citizenship legislation might reconcile or exacerbate age-old fissures within Liberia’s national fabric, further replacing the indigene vs. settler divide with the homeland Liberian vs. diasporic Liberian divide. Coupling state-building and nation-building as mutually constitutive elements in an an

Sankara was somewhat unique as a revolutionary leader - and particularly as a president - in attributing the success of the revolution to the obtainment of gender equality. Sankara said, ‘The revolution and women’s liberation go together. We do not talk of women’s emancipation as an act of charity or out of a surge of human compassion. It is a basic necessity for the revolution to triumph’.

Thomas Sankara, a Burkinabé with military training, had witnessed the student and worker-led uprisings in Madagascar.

Blaise Compaoré remains the president of Burkina Faso today and has been implicated in conflicts in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Cote d’Ivoire, and in arms trafficking and the trafficking of diamonds. There has been no independent investigation into Thomas Sankara’s assassination, despite repeated requests by the judiciary committee of the International Campaign for Justice for Thomas Sankara, a legal group working in the name of the Sankara family. The UN Committee for Human Rights closed Sankara’s record in April of 2008, without conducting an investigation into the crimes.

The revolution’s promises are already a reality for men. But for women, they are still merely a rumor. And yet the authenticity and the future of our revolution depend on women. Nothing definitive or lasting can be accomplished in our country as long as a crucial part of ourselves is kept in this condition of subjugation - a condition imposed…by various systems of exploitation.

He locates the roots of African women’s oppression in the historical processes of European colonialism and the unequal social relations of capitalism and capital exploitation. Most importantly, he stressed the importance of women’s equal mobilisation. He urges Burkinabé women into revolutionary action, not as passive victims but as respected, equal partners in the revolution and wellbeing of the nation. He acknowledges the central space of African women in African society and demanded that other Burkinabé men do the same.

In an interview with the Cameroonian anticolonial historian Mongo Beti, he said, ‘We are fighting for the equality of men and women - not a mechanical, mathematical equality but making women the equal of men before the law and especially in relation to wage labor. The emancipation of women requires their education and their gaining economic power. In this way, labor on an equal footing with men on all levels, having the same responsibilities and the same rights and obligations…’.

He criticised the oppressive gendered nature of the capitalist system, where women (particularly women with children to support) make an ideal labour force because the need to support their families renders them malleable and controllable to exploitative labour practices.

US-backed militarisation of Africa takes a couple of different forms.

First, it means an increase in troops on the ground. US Special Ops and US military personnel have been deployed in the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mali, Mauritania, South Sudan, and (potentially) Nigeria.

Second, US military personnel conduct training sequences with African militaries.

Third, the US military funds social science research into African society, culture and politics. This takes various forms, one of which is the use of SCRATs (or Sociocultural Advisory Teams) for the purposes of preparing US military personnel for deployment and missions.

A strong military structure paves the way for the resource plunder and large scale dispossessions that are seen in neoliberal states in the so-called Global South. In this system, the state ensures profit for class elites (both international and domestic) by guaranteeing the super-exploitation of labour and the dispossession of millions of people of their lands and livelihoods for resource extraction at serious costs to local ecology, health and wellbeing. This guarantee can only be made through an increased militarism that stifles political mobilisation.

Thomas Sankara and the August Revolution of 1983 tells us another story. They provide a different way of thinking about social organisation. Sankara understood that capitalism is dependent upon the unequal deployment of and distribution of power, particularly state power. But, as he showed us, the state is not unalterable. The state is a complex system of human relationships that are maintained through violent power/coercion and persuasion. And what Sankara did was work to bring the state apparatus down to the level of the people, so to speak.

The image of my daughter’s grandfather entering his home and collapsing onto the sofa, holding his face in his hands and crying emerges in my head each time I think of Sankara. This image of a middle aged Cameroonian man, Jacque Ndewa, thousands of miles away, who had never travelled to Burkina Faso, crying quietly on his sofa. This is the resonance that Sankara had, across the African continent and among disenfranchised and dispossessed people everywhere.