The international factor in african warfare

Generalizing about recent wars and their global connections in a continent as diverse as Africa is a tricky business. The 1998-2000 Ethiopian-Eritrean border war looked like a classic interstate war, with trenches and front lines, field artillery and coordinated ground-air attacks as armies fought over the delineation of an international boundary. Around the same time wars in Congo and Somalia involved the collapse of state authority as ethnic militias, criminal gangs, religious ideologues, elements of old national armies, and armies of intervening states engaged in complex struggles. These wars have taken on new roles in global politics, too. After the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington, external actors began to view Somalia’s conflict through the lens of counterterrorism. Congo’s war appeared in international media as a humanitarian crisis. Some saw Sudan’s counterinsurgency campaign in Darfur in the mid-2000s as an act of genocide, and fighting in South Sudan since 2013 has been seen in many quarters as part of a process of state collapse.