POLI 354 Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: Humanitarian Intervention, Security Dilemma, Mobutu Sese Seko
13 May 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
POLI 360 Wed, Feb 7, 2018
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Lecture 10: Democratic Peace
Midterm Exam
• Unit on nuclear deterrence (week 6) - not on the exam
• Format:
o 1 out of 2 essays (worth 40%)
o 6 out of 8 short-answer questions (worth 60%)
• Focus on concepts as well as cases
• Focus on readings as well as lectures
• Concepts: Security Dilemma, Human Security, all cases
Errol Henderson "Disturbing the Peace":
• Democratic Peace has been hailed as virtually an empirical law
• But quantitative analyses don't look at Africa specifically
• Perception of Africa as "mainly a region of terrible human suffering, worthy at times of
humanitarian intervention, but with little relevance to larger theoretical concerns
IR and African Wars
• IR scholars have said that their own theories about war don't apply to weak and failed
states
• Colonial and imperial wars are rarely considered to be international wars - though that's
what they are - so they get excluded from IR analysis
o Colonialism - not considered international wars
What does Henderson mean by "inversion"?
• He means that interstate disputes in Africa for the most part get resolves peacefully, as
you would expect to happen on the domestic level
• Meanwhile, intra-state disputes are often resolved through violence, as you would expect
to see instead on the international level
• Violence in Africa - mostly intra-state (internal) - not inter-state/external
Why?
• Because of two things:
1. The nature of the international state system in Africa
2. The nature of governments in African states
The International State System in Africa
• Arbitrary colonial borders often created states that were not viable
• Berlin Conference 1884-85 - Colonial mapping
