This book a concise examination of U.S. policy in contemporary Africa delineates various
aspects of the role that the U.S. played in exacerbating and or resolving violent conflicts in
postcolonial Africa and provides a succinct historical overview of these armed conflicts. F.
Ugboaja Ohaegbulam devotes considerable attention to four specific conflicts in
Ethiopia-Somalia the Western Sahara Angola and Rwanda and to the Clinton administration's
African Crisis Response Initiative and its sequel under George W. Bush. The book concludes that
lack of congruence between local forces in conflict in Africa as well as U.S. aims in those
conflicts was only one of the constraints on the United States in its attempts at conflict
resolution. America's counterproductive Cold War policies also defined relations with African
states for far too long. Hence the conflicts in postcolonial Africa became part of the legacy
of those policies even as African problems continued to be low-priority concerns for the U.S.
government. Libraries advanced undergraduate and graduate students and professors of African
studies as well as the general reader will find this book useful.
