Encina Hall, Central Conference Room
The war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), which began in August 1998, is unprecedented-at times involving armies from eight African states. Soldiers from Chad are fighting alongside regiments from Namibia, Angola, and Zimbabwe in defense of President Laurent Kabila. And on offense, the two main rebel groups, the Congolese Assembly for Democracy (which is known by the acronym RCD) and the Movement for the Liberation of Congo (MLC), are backed by troops from Uganda and Rwanda. As Susan E. Rice, assistant secretary of state for African affairs, warned the House International Relations Committee in September 1998, "The fighting threatens regional stability, hampers economic progress, endangers the lives of millions of people, perpetuates human rights abuses, and impedes the democratic transformation of Africa's third-largest country." This war, Rice said, is potentially "among the most dangerous conflicts on the globe."
Yet, the war in Congo goes on almost unnoticed outside of Africa. While African heads of state spent much of the last year shuttling across the continent, wrestling with the crisis and searching for a peaceful solution, Congo has been largely missing from the agendas of the Western powers and multilateral organizations. Only in January, when the U.S. representative to the United Nations, Richard Holbrooke, taking advantage of his tenure as Security Council president to draw attention to Africa, did the war enter Western consciousness.
The conflict in the DRC is the first interstate war in sub-Saharan Africa since Uganda invaded Tanzania in 1978, and only the third since 1960. Although Africa is seen as a hotbed of violence and warfare, most conflicts have been intrastate in nature. Norms of sovereignty reinforced by clauses in the charter of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) and the constitutions of the various subregional organizations have effectively prevented cross-border conflict from the time of independence until now. The Ugandan and Rwandan-led invasion of Congo, as well as the presence there of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) intervention force, therefore represents a watershed in the recent history of African conflict. It appears that the forces preventing cross-border conflict since 1960 have become seriously weakened.
What are the implications of the rise of interstate war in Africa for peace and security on the continent? Why have Western powers been so reluctant to take an active role in resolving Africa's first "world war"? And what impact will the changing nature of warfare in Africa have on U.S. policy and the role of the United Nations there?
Until recently, analysts of civil war focused their attention on the negotiation of peace agreements and paid scant attention to the implementation process. Rather legalistically, they assumed that a contract between state and insurgent leaders would remain binding in the post-agreement phase. In the 1980s and 1990s, however, negotiated agreements in such countries as Angola, Cambodia, Liberia, and Rwanda collapsed and resulted in new deadly violence. In some cases more blood was shed after the failure to implement a peace accord than before the peace negotiations began.
Ethnic conflicts in the former Soviet Union, and their potential for triggering serious interstate conflicts, pose a major threat to regional and international security in the years ahead. Even as the dissolution of the Soviet Union diminished the threat of nuclear and conventional warfare on which the postwar alliance system rested, the disruptive consequences of the major political, economic and social transformations sweeping the region have created a variety of new threats to regional security.
Not in residence
Gail Lapidus is a Senior Fellow Emerita at the Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. Lapidus is also Professor Emerita of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, and served as Chair of the Berkeley-Stanford Program in Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies from 1985 to 1994. A specialist on Soviet society, politics and foreign policy, she has authored and edited a number of books on Soviet and post-Soviet affairs, including The New Russia: Troubled Transformation (Westview Press, 1995), From Union to Commonwealth: Nationalism and Separatism in the Soviet Republics, with Victor Zaslavsky and Philip Goldman (Cambridge University Press, 1992), The Soviet System in Crisis, with Alexander Dallin (Westview, 1992), and Women in Soviet Society (University of California Press, 1979). A graduate of Radcliffe College, she received her MA and PhD from Harvard University.
Lapidus is also the author of numerous articles and chapters, including "The War in Chechnya as a Paradigm of Russian State-Building Under Putin," Post-Soviet Affairs, March 2004; "Putin's War on Terrorism: Lessons From Chechnya," Post-Soviet Affairs, January-March 2002; "Accommodating Ethnic Differences in Post-Soviet Eurasia," in Crawford Young and Mark Beissinger, eds., Beyond State Crisis? Post-Colonial Africa and Post-Soviet Eurasia in Comparative Perspective; "Transforming the 'National Question': New Approaches to Nationalism, Federalism and Sovereignty," in Archie Brown, ed., The Demise of Marxism-Leninism in Russia (Palgrave, 2004); "Transforming Russia: American Policy in the 1990s," in Robert Lieber, ed., America Rules? Foreign Policy and American Primacy in the 21st Century (Prentice Hall, 2001); and "Reagan and the Russians: American Policy Toward the Soviet Union," with Alexander Dallin, in Kenneth Oye et al., eds., Eagle Resurgent? The Reagan Era in American Foreign Policy (Little, Brown, 1987).
Lapidus is a member of the Council of Foreign Relations, as well as of several scholarly associations. She has held a variety of scholarly and administrative appointments, including president of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, chair of the Social Science Research Council's Joint Committee on Soviet Studies, the Advisory Council of the Woodrow Wilson Center's Kennan Institute, the Committee on International Political Science of the American Political Science Association, and the board of Trustees of the World Affairs Council of Northern California. She has held research fellowships at the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, at the Harriman Institute at Columbia University and at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. A frequent visitor to the USSR and now to a number of successor states, Professor Lapidus is currently working on a book on the impact of the Soviet legacy on patterns of conflict in the post-Soviet states.
CISAC
Stanford University
Encina Hall
Stanford, CA 94305-6165
James Fearon is the Theodore and Frances Geballe Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences and a professor of political science. He is a Senior Fellow at FSI, affiliated with CISAC and CDDRL. His research interests include civil and interstate war, ethnic conflict, the international spread of democracy and the evaluation of foreign aid projects promoting improved governance. Fearon was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2012 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2002. Some of his current research projects include work on the costs of collective and interpersonal violence, democratization and conflict in Myanmar, nuclear weapons and U.S. foreign policy, and the long-run persistence of armed conflict.
The Caspian Basin has emerged in recent years as a major focus of international affairs for a combination of political, economic, and geostrategic reasons. In the immediate aftermath of the Soviet Union's dissolution in the early 1990s the region's newly independent states were overshadowed by Russia and attracted little Western and U.S. attention. But over the past several years this region has attracted growing attention from Western policymakers and scholars, as well as the media and the private sector. One of the main reasons for this new focus on the Caspian is its sizable energy reserves. In addition to its potential as a significant oil producer, however, it is also the Caspian's geostrategic location, its diverse mix of ethnic groups, and its unsettled intrastate and interstate conflicts that make it both an enticing and challenging region.
In May 1999, CISAC's Project on Ethnic Conflict and Conflict Management in the Former Soviet Union convened an international conference to examine emerging geopolitical issues of the Caspian Basin region. Scholars, policymakers, and energy executives from around the world gathered to examine the sometimes contending interests, both political and economic, focused on the region, and to seek to develop a comprehensive approach for enhancing political and economic development, mitigating and resolving conflicts, and promoting security and stability in the region. Panelists examined conflicting political and economic approaches to the region and explored strategies for energy development that might facilitate regional economic growth and democratization. They also offered diverse views about whether energy development could promote regional cooperation and integration or was likely to exacerbate existing conflicts.
The conference was part of the Project on Ethnic Conflict's ongoing activities in the Caspian region. Project director Gail Lapidus and others at CISAC have been working closely with scholars and policymakers in the region for a number of years on issues of nationalism, conflict resolution, and regional security. One of the project's central goals has been to encourage and facilitate regional cooperation on a broad range of humanitarian, economic, and political issues. In support of that objective, the project has engaged in joint efforts with key political actors in the region in attempts to develop fresh approaches to conflict management and to construct new regional security arrangements.
This report and the conference it is based on are motivated by the sharp debate stemming from NATO's decision at Madrid to invite three new members to join its ranks. This debate is not partisan: it cleaves parties. It is profound because it has kindled the first truly geostrategic inquiry among Americans in the post-Cold War era. This inquiry has led Americans to advance from celebrating the end of the Cold War to confronting the design of Eurasia's future security system and America's role in it.
This report is the result of a workshop held in April 1998, when fifty policy experts, government officials and scholars met in Washington, DC. to discuss an issue of great import: the future of the relationship between Ukraine and NATO, This event, the Workshop on Ukraine-NATO Relations, was sponsored by the Harvard University Project on Ukrainian Security and the Stanford-Harvard Preventive Defense Project. The express goal of the workshop was to bring together representatives of Ukraine, NATO, and the United States so that they could collaborate on developing concrete recommendations for short and long-term next steps to broaden and deepen Ukraine-NATO relations.
The conveners of this workshop believed that the relationship developing [at that time] between Ukraine and NATO had the capacity to evolve into an important force for stability and security in Europe and the world, and to serve as a model for other countries in the region. While the NATO-Ukraine Charter and Ukraine's participation in the Partnership for Peace and the NATO peacekeeping mission in Bosnia provided a strong foundation, the longer-term direction of this very important relationship continued to be largely undefined. Further, they strongly believed that the Charter on a Distinctive Partnership signed by Ukraine and NATO in the summer of 1997 was only the first step towards institutionalizing the growing Ukraine-NATO relationship. Ensuring that the Charter was meaningful depended on concrete implementation of the cooperation anticipated in that document. Thus they decided that a concerted effort needed to be made to develop a gameplan for the future.
Gail Lapidus of Stanford University assesses the factors leading to Moscow's decision in December 1994 to use military force to crush Chechnya's resistance to the authority of the Russian leadership. Exhaustively researched and documented, Lapidus's study traces the evolution of the secessionist struggle through six stages. At the heart of the conflict, she says, was the Chechens' growing desire for sovereignty and territorial integrity sparked by Mikhail Gorbachev's political liberalization initiatives and further fueled by the establishment of a number of new states after the breakup of the Soviet Union. Lapidus also considers the role of Western governments and international institutions first in preventing the outbreak of hostilities and then in mitigating and, finally, terminating the conflict. She concludes that when the behavior of a major power is at issue, the potential for outside intervention is limited, which in turn raises a host of troubling questions about the prospects for future internal conflict resolution.
