Effective Defense Support for Public Diplomacy (DSPD) with a Sub-Saharan Africa Target Audience: A Case Study of the African Crisis Response Force Proposal
Abstract : The aim of this thesis is to evaluate the effectiveness of Department of Defense (DoD) Defense Support for Public Diplomacy (DSPD) sources and messages using the African Crisis Response Force (ACRF) as a controlled comparison case study. The ACRF case can provide useful lessons for USAFRICOM on how to communicate more effectively with its African partners. From a more narrow DSPD perspective, the absence of an explicit adversary in Africa means that military tactics there should be focused on capturing human terrain through the robust utilization of information operations rather than more conventional stratagems. To accomplish this, the DoD needs to understand how to communicate effectively with Africans. The command's focus on interagency cooperation and building partnerships with African states makes successful Information Operations even more critical and the role of DPSD even more central to ensuring that DoD actions align with and complement other elements of national power to synchronize an American grand strategy in Africa. The focus in this thesis is on informational causal mechanisms, defined as the "physical, social, or psychological processes through which agents with causal capacities operate, but only in specific contexts or conditions, to transfer energy, information, or matter to other entities." Using Wilbur Schramm's disaggregation of communications into a source and message, the case studies will treat the ACRF's and related DSPD sources and messages as independent variables, and the acceptance or rejection of ACRF as the dependent variable. The target audience is composed of the state-level actors who possessed the ability to accept or reject the ACRF proposal.
Africa in the New International Order: Rethinking State Sovereignty and Regional Security
Part 1 Regional Change and Global Security Issues: the Role of Regional and Global Organisations in Addressing Africa's Security Issues, I. Gambari the OAU, State Sovereignty and Regional Security, S. Gomes Regional Security and Changing Patterns of Relations, I.W. Zartman. Part 2 Country Studies: Somalia - a Regional Security Dilemma, A. Simons Civil War and Identity in Sudan's Foreign Policy, F. Deng and K. Medani the International Context of Internal War - Ethiopia/Eritrea, T. Lyons Ethnic Conflict and Security in Southern Africa, M. Ottaway Regional Security in Southern Africa in the Post-Cold War Era, D. Venter. Part 3 ECOMOG: Liberia, and Regional Security in West Africa, R. Mortimer the Involvement of ECOWAS in Peacekeeping in Liberia, M. Vog. Part 4 Extracontinental Actors and Regional Security: removing the shackles? US Policy Toward Africa After the Cold War, P. Schraeder Moscow's Policies in Africa, J. Lefebvre.
Making War and Waging Peace: Foreign Intervention in Africa. Edited by David R. Smock. Washington: U.S. Institute of Peace Press, 1993. 290p. $19.95 paper.
Funders of policy-relevant research often worry about getting the results to the appropriate people. Left to themselves, academic researchers tend to publish expensive books or scatter obscure articles. The U.S. Institute of Peace, which sponsors a lot of high-quality research, has established its own press to publish and disseminate the results itself. This book is a collection of such research on intervention in Africa. As such, it is not really a book in the usual sense: it is more like an issue of a good journal (perhaps explaining why there is no index). The quality of the individual pieces is quite high; but they are only tenuously related to one another, they do not present a comprehensive view of the subject, and there is not even the usual figleaf of an editor's conclusion to try to tie them together. Given these limitations, this is a very useful collection that advances our understanding of an important issue, albeit incrementally. Its low price should make it accessible to both policymakers and academics and encourage classroom adoption. Overall, the book is stronger on cases than theory. Strong chapters on civil wars in Ethiopia, Sudan, Namibia, Angola, and Mozambique are well done and remarkably current, the best I have seen in print. Three broader chapters examine French, British, and Belgian military involvement; Organization for African Unity intervention; and the notion that successful intervention may involve many outside actors (rather than only one). The final chapter is a summary of Chester Crocker's congressional testimony on improving African peacemaking capabilities. Overall, the book contributes to the literature both by adding new and important cases and by implicitly confirming some widely held ideas. Christopher Mitchell's argument that different interveners can play different roles in the same case is confirmed both by his own analysis of the two Sudanese cases and by the Mozambique chapter (although the apparent assumption of a single kind of settlement process remains controversial). Several cases support the argument that settlement requires that both sides be strong internally so that they can control their extremists and deliver on their promises. Crocker argues that settlements are the result of "the right alignment—the proper constellation—of local, regional, and international events." Since this cannot readily be predicted, outside mediators should keep trying all the time. (The counterargument that some mediation acts may actually make things worse is not analyzed, although Carter's 1989 failure in the Sudanese case is cited as an example [pp. 126-27].) Finally, the authors are unanimous that foreign intervention does not make war or peace but, instead, strengthens or weakens particular locals and provides new alternatives and options for them. The book accurately reflects current professional research in this field. Its authors focus on settlement, on encouraging local elites to decide to stop fighting, and on how foreign intervention affects that goal. There is no analysis of the problems of followers (either fighters or noncombatants) and how these may influence collective behavior, including obedience to elites. After civil war, most countries are left with massive problems, such as demobilization, development, and nation building. The role of foreign intervention in such activities is mentioned but ignored—although, presumably, a government's response to these problems will influence whether the settlement "sticks" or not. (This omission is particularly annoying in the Angolan case, where the collapse was attributed precisely to the failure of demobilization.) It is difficult to develop general ideas about when intervention takes place by focusing exclusively on the targets of such intervention, since cases of nonintervention are left out. Any such analysis would have to focus on the politics of the intervening countries themselves, looking for the dogs that do not bark, the interventions that do not occur. On balance, then, this is a very useful collection, with the virtues (and some of the limitations) of current research on the study of foreign intervention in the Third World.