Executive Summary
- The Commitment Problem
- Engaging Recalcitrant States: Nigeria and Sudan
- Managing Complex Civil Wars: Burundi
- Sustaining Attention to Peacebuilding: Liberia and Angola
- Coping in a Disengagement Environment

Future U.S. Engagement in Africa: Opportunities and Obstacles for Conflict Management

Participants

About this Report

Endnotes

SPECIAL REPORT 17

Future U.S. Engagement in Africa
Opportunities and Obstacles for Conflict Management

Executive Summary

Africa's marginalization in U.S. foreign policy has increasingly become a reality; this disengagement by the United States from African affairs presumably weakens its interests as well as its ability to help prevent and end armed conflicts on the continent. The effect of this disengagement on the management of conflicts in Africa was the subject of a one-day symposium convened by the United States Institute of Peace on April 22, 1996. Twenty-five specialists on Africa -- U.S. diplomats, scholars, and representatives of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) -- discussed the causes of and problems with U.S. disengagement, and prospects for future U.S. engagement, with a specific focus on situations in Nigeria, Sudan, Angola, Burundi, and Liberia. This report summarizes the discussion and outlines the principal participant recommendations that emanated from the symposium.

The Commitment Problem

• In virtually every conflict situation in Africa today, the credibility of the U.S. government's words and deeds is questioned. American diplomats are hamstrung by the U.S. domestic climate of disengagement, which has produced a decline in the attention given to these conflicts by senior officials and in the institutional and resource capabilities that would facilitate U.S. engagement.
• Overcoming declining U.S. credibility, analysts suggest, is not just a matter of reversing the disengagement trend, but is also a matter of devising innovative ways to deal with new types of problems that armed conflicts in Africa pose.
• Disengagement from Africa affects U.S. interests in a number of tangible ways. It undermines U.S. claims to global leadership, results in lost opportunities for trade and investment ties, may jeopardize access to critical strategic minerals, and inhibits the ability to stave off environmental disasters that can have global consequences. Moreover, the United States has a humanitarian interest in saving lives and preventing, or refusing to tolerate, genocide.

Engaging Recalcitrant States: Nigeria and Sudan

• The U.S. government's credibility problem is especially acute in dealing with ongoing or potential conflicts in states where the regimes are relatively powerful and wield considerable influence in their subregions or in Africa as a whole, such as Nigeria and Sudan.
• Many participants argued that it is critical for the United States, in pursuit of its own interests, to play a central role in helping bring Nigeria back into the international fold. Nigeria is far too significant a player in regional and international politics to be allowed to become an isolated and angry "rogue" state.
• Symposium participants were divided on how to best persuade the present military government in Nigeria to encourage meaningful democratic reform and stave off impending conflict. Some recommend a heavy sanctions policy, others favor pressured engagement, and still others advocate a selective engagement policy. Some observers questioned whether the current regime is reformable at all.
• Participants offered ideas on how to influence the Nigerian regime. These include focusing on Nigeria's need for debt relief, bolstering the democratic opposition, capitalizing on the desire for new direct foreign investment, engaging the country's rulers more directly through enhanced military-to-military exchanges, seizing the rulers' offshore assets, and considering the promotion of shared military-civilian rule for a transitional period.
• The problem in Sudan is similar to that in Nigeria in that this cornered, aggressive regime is resistant to most external pressures to reform. The situation in Sudan is further complicated by the fact that within the North and South the parties are factionalized and sometimes in violent conflict with one another.

Managing Complex Civil Wars: Burundi

• The principal challenge for U.S. policy in "failed" or failing states such as Somalia, Rwanda, and Burundi is how to provide an appropriate blend of incentives toward more peaceful interaction and disincentives toward violence.
• The challenge in Burundi is no longer one of early warning and preventive action -- levels of violence are already high -- but one of containing violence and preventing escalation to the point of genocide.
• In the absence of extensive official U.S. engagement and easily identifiable traditional levers of influence, NGOs and private diplomacy have helped fill the vacuum. Among the more important innovations are the Burundi Policy Forum and the "Great Lakes" initiative of former U.S. President Carter and former Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere.
• In situations such as those in Rwanda and Burundi, dealing effectively with the injustices of the past is critical to breaking the culture of impunity that provides incentives for violence. Truth commissions and other transitional justice mechanisms such as international criminal tribunals can often have "demonstration" effects in neighboring states -- that is, they show that severe human rights abuses may eventually lead to punishment.

Sustaining Attention to Peacebuilding: Liberia and Angola

• Even when peace agreements are reached, their implementation is by no means ensured. Liberia's most recent strife, like Rwanda's, is a case of the implementation of a peace agreement gone awry. There is an urgent need to renegotiate the Abuja agreement, Liberia's most recent peace accord, and to solve the critical problem of warlordism.
• A critical current concern among policymakers is how to reconfigure the West African peacekeeping force ECOMOG (Economic Community of West African States Military Observer Group) in such a way that it can contribute to stabilizing the situation in Liberia.
• Very close U.S. oversight in Angola has kept the pressure on the involved parties to live up to the terms of the 1994 peace agreement, particularly with regard to military integration and troop demobilization. The United States is therefore well placed to stimulate a national dialogue within Angola on its long-term future.

Coping in a Disengagement Environment

• There are ways for the United States to continue promoting conflict management in a disengagement environment: create trade and investment incentives for peace, back NGO and private peacemaking efforts, enhance cooperation with U.S. allies, and further strengthen African and regional conflict management capabilities.
• Participants widely agreed that policymakers should take a closer look at the actual and potential role of foreign (particularly U.S.) investors in promoting peace (or contributing to conflict) in Africa, and, relatedly, the role of international financial institutions in supporting conflict management as an element of structural adjustment and development programs.
• The future of U.S. engagement in Africa in promoting conflict management will increasingly depend on the ability of proponents of such engagement to clearly articulate not only U.S. interests in the continent, but also how various policies and tools aimed at conflict management can have a demonstrable impact on furthering those interests.

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See the complete list of Institute reports. The views expressed in this report do not necessarily reflect those of the United States Institute of Peace, which does not advocate specific policies.