UNITED NATIONS, DECOLONIZATION, AND SELF-DETERMINATION IN COLD WAR SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA, 1960-1994, THE

Although the East-West conflict had receded, the UN would confront new challenges and a resurgence of nationalism, separatism, and ethnic conflict, which would demand innovative responses, particularly in the area of conflict prevention, peacekeeping, and nation building. Furthermore, NorthSouth tensions over trade and economic development continued as before and in some ways were exacerbated by globalization and the breakdown of the Cold War international order.

Africa would not top the post-Cold War agenda. With the end of the Cold War there would be new regions of UN concern, including parts of the world where the UN had been largely excluded previously, such as the Balkans, Central America, the Caribbean, and the former Soviet republics. There would be new challenges thrown up by globalization and, after 2001, an increasing trend in the United States in favor of unilateralism and intervention would threaten once again to marginalize the United Nation's role in the world. The end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet empire and the revolutions in Russia, central Europe, and much of Latin America, ushered in a new era in the relations among states. But the opportunity to utilize the UN to address African problems subsequently passed. With the dissolution of the USSR no other power remained but the United States to lead the way, and Washington met the challenge with remarkable shortsightedness.

The 1990s nevertheless witnessed an explosion of United Nations activity throughout Africa, including peacekeeping, humanitarian relief, and conflict prevention. The UN's seventh Secretary General, Kofi Annan of Ghana, sought to focus the world's attention on poverty, the HIV/AIDS crisis, and child combatants in Africa. As the former head of UN peacekeeping, and the first secretary General from sub-Saharan Africa, he has articulated an "Annan Doctrine" positing that states cannot commit atrocities while hiding behind a veil of "sovereignty" and that outside powers should reconsider humanitarian intervention in Africa.

Throughout the post-Cold War era, UN peacekeeping operations have become most active in Africa, achieving successes in places such as Namibia and, to a lesser extent, Mozambique, but also suffering several well-publicized failures, most notably in Somalia, which had a profound impact on thinking about the capabilities of UN peacekeeping operations and contributed to the UN's more muted response to both the Rwandan genocide and the subsequent Great Lakes crisis. UN peacekeeping has nonetheless expanded into areas such as Liberia, Sierra Leone, Western Sahara, and the dispute between Ethiopia and Eritrea.

The crisis in post-Cold War Somalia, for example, engaged the United Nations like nothing before. In this, the first large-scale African crisis of the post-Cold War era, the UN confronted the challenges of providing humanitarian relief on a massive scale compounded by the widespread collapse of the institutions of state. The UN found itself overwhelmed by the anarchic conditions in Somalia, where as many as 15 armed factions vied for power, and by the difficulty of coordinating a multinational peacekeeping force of nearly 40,000 from more than 20 nations, the largest and most expensive UN operation to date. That the United States began to evolve different priorities and aims once in Somalia further complicated the UN's mission. One factor in the Somali crisis of the 1990s lay in the legacies of the geopolitics of the Cold War on the horn of Africa. The postcolonial state became entangled in the politics of the Cold War, as both Washington and Moscow sought control of the region with its strategic location on the Horn. Both superpowers contributed to making Somalia's army the largest in Africa. The colonial-era effort to create a modern nation state proved disruptive to traditional society, where most Somalis looked to their clans for political identity, not a centralized state.26