Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research releases a dossier exploring the enduring and expanding presence of foreign militaries in Africa and its impact on political unity and territorial sovereignty.
The
enduring presence of foreign military bases in Africa continues to
fragment and weaken African state institutions, prevent African unity
and sovereignty, and subordinate the aspirations of the continent for
pan-African consolidation. Examining gendarme functions and geopolitics,
dossier no. 42 explores how the presence of foreign militaries in
Africa continues to impede African people in their pursuit of the two
most important principles of pan-Africanism: political unity and
territorial sovereignty.
Not
only is the footprint of the US military on the African continent
quantitatively larger than that of any other non-African country’s bases
on the continent, but the sheer scale of the military’s presence and
activities also gives it a qualitatively different character. This
character includes the capacity of the United States to defend its
interests on the continent, operating as the gendarme not for the world
community, but for the beneficiaries of capitalism. Furthermore, it
attempts to prevent any serious competition to its control of resources
and markets through a ‘new cold war’, through which the US exerts
pressure to contain China on the continent as part of its broader
geopolitical aggression.
The failure to properly harness resources and drive a programme on the African continent for the well-being of the people produces the social context for both political and military conflicts, including insurgencies that are often refracted along ethnic and religious lines, and for the expansion of migration around the continent and towards Europe. Two results of the deeper economic crisis of African states – conflict and migration – produce the surface-level excuse for countries like the United States and France to establish military bases on the continent. As Commodore John Nowell, who runs the Africa Partnership Station of the US government’s Africa Command, AFRICOM, said in 2008, ‘We wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t in [US] interests’.
Read Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research’s new dossier, Defending Our Sovereignty: US Military Bases in Africa and the Future of African Unity.
Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research is an international, movement-driven institution that carries out empirically based research guided by political movements. We seek to bridge gaps in our knowledge about the political economy as well as social hierarchy that will facilitate the work of our political movements and engage in the ‘battle of ideas’ to fight against bourgeois ideology, which has swept through intellectual institutions from the academy to the media.
SOURCE ; thetricontinental.org
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