| | As 2007 opens, the world's attention is predominantly focused on the worsening crisis and imperialist violence in Iraq and now, too, Somalia. In both cases, the current context has roots in the contradictions of the Cold War, when the Western powers supported and armed authoritarian regimes (including, during the 1980s, those of Siyad Barre in Somalia and Saddam Hussain in Iraq) and proxy forces (including the CIA-recruited Islamist 'mujahideen' which later formed the basis for al -Qaida) in the name of 'containment'. Now in the era of the 'War on Terrorism' the same imperial logics are reproduced, as imperialist intervention reinforces and arms reactionary, sectarian and authoritarian forces. This may be seen as the other side of a coin on which the face value is the long-term promotion of neo-liberal 'freedoms' across the globe.
The immediate nature of the crisis in the Horn of Africa, particularly in Sudan and Somalia, has distracted attention from this underlying agenda in which the condition of Africa had acquired a more prominent place in public discourse in the West, especially after the campaigns and debates surrounding Blair's Commission for Africa and the G8 summit meeting in Scotland in 2005. These events had prompted considerable public debate in Western media which was reflected in a series of articles about Africa published in non-Africanist journals in politics and international relations. One outcome for critical observers from the left was the need for greater analytical input and the encouragement for more work that seeks to understand the interplay between the political economies of specific African contexts and global intentions more deeply than these widely publicised events portrayed, and especially to allow scope for a greater degree of agency for social movements, politicians, organised workers and producers and activists in all those countries which are, or are likely to be, the object of Western attention. |
