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Chris W. J. Roberts, MSS, PhD(ABD)
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Africa and the end of the Third World

8/10/2010

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     CBC Radio this morning ran a segment on its national program  "The Current" that looked at the new Africa and the increasingly questioned concept of the Third World. You can link to the audio clip here (and scroll down for a text overview of the show). This is part of their ongoing "Africa at 50" series. Hopefully this series will at least begin to shift the mindsets of most Canadians who still think about the continent in two automatic modes: abject poverty and wholesale conflict.
    Over at the Business News Network (BNN), Africa is increasingly popping up as a topic in its own right. For years, many financial experts or fund managers would come on the network and reveal their complete lack of knowledge about many African countries' economic direction and political trends. There would be no discussion about how major Canadian corporations, including SNC Lavalin, Bombardier, Canadian National Resources, and a whole host of senior and junior miners, were successfully navigating the seemingly impenetrable shoals of doing business across Africa. That is no longer the case. The recent Kinross bid for African-focused Red Back Mining (active in Ghana and Mauritania) put Africa's natural resources in the spotlight for yet another day. Not long ago, the
CEO of Emerging Capital Partners was on "After Hours" to discuss another $700 million fund that will only invest in Africa.  There is still a long way to go at BNN to educate the hosts, writers, and producers about the best questions to ask when it comes to African topics and stories, but for now they reflect the generalized limited knowledge already prevalent in the public and are learning right along with them.
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Pentagon cuts but Africa still important to joint thinking

8/9/2010

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     Defense Secretary Robert Gates is looking to trim the bloated Pentagon budget, and Joint Forces Command is in his sights. The other nine combatant commands, presumably including Africom, will face contractor roll-backs and a freeze on hiring for three years. Given that Africom is still not fully staffed, it will be interesting to see whether this mandate applies to this junior command. 
     Joint Forces Command may gradually fade away, but the Pentagon's flagship journal, Joint Forces Quarterly (JFQ), established in 1993 under Secretary Les Aspin's watch, will likely have to carry a heavier load as the purveyor of  everything "joint."  Over the last few years Africa emerged as a major focus of JFQ , and this accelerated after Africom was announced in 2007. With many stories about China's rise in Africa, terrorism, piracy, support for African Union peacekeeping, the Navy's Africa Partnership Station initiative, etc., it is not that surprising the most recent
July 2010 issue includes the cover theme, "Identity Politics in Africa and the Americas."  It is worth a look. JFQ is fully and freely available online right back to issue one. There are very real, sometimes visceral, debates on strategy, policy, and doctrine in its pages.  
   
National Defense University Press, JFQ 's publisher, also just released a detailed and frightening report on "
Cocaine and Instability in Africa: Lessons from Latin America and the Caribbean" (July 2010).   Implications for governance across West Africa, not just Guinea Bissau, are potentially immense.
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    Picture
    A statue in Arusha, Tanzania honoring local TPDF soldiers who died during the war with Idi Amin (1978-79)

    Author

    Chris WJ Roberts is a Canadian international business and policy consultant; a student of African politics, international relations, and Canadian foreign policy working towards a PhD in political science at the University of Alberta; and an instructor in political science at the University of Calgary (2014-2018).

    This irregular blog provides an outlet for an "entrepreneurial academic" to make small interventions around the theme of Africa in the World. In many respects it acts as a research notebook, capturing issues, sources, and ideas to be used for more detailed analysis in the future.

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