“Abandoning diplomacy for confrontation.....is a dive over a cliff,” - Antonio Guterres, UN Chief

Global and domestic policies of the United States can be traced as far back as the period of Atlantic Slave Trade. Ani and Ojakorotu (2017) assert that slave trade was institutionalized by the European slave merchants who in collaboration with their African mercenaries began to export many Africans to America, Europe and West Indies. With time the slaves started resisting and did so successfully in Haiti from 1791-1803 under the leadership of Touissant L’Ouverture who defeated the French.      After American independence of 1776, continued interest in the developments on the African continent by those of African descent in the Americas led to the formation of groups such as The Council on African Affairs (CAA), the American Negro Leadership Conference on Africa (ANLCA) and the African Liberation Support Committee (ALSC) that worked within the United States to support African causes between 1939 and 1977. The Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) over the years emerged as an ...

  A review of the article titled ‘Master or Servant? Common Agency and the Political Economy of IMF Lending’ by Mark S. Copelovitch For a Kenyan who is worried about the debt appetite of their government and the willingness of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to feed into that appetite, there is no better time to reflect on the contents of Copelovitch’s article than now. The author looks at arguments that the IMF is the servant of the United States and other powerful member-states or if as others contend that the Fund’s professional staff act independently in pursuit of its own bureaucratic interests. According to the author, the IMF is a major player in global financial governance and this has been the case for decades now having provided emergency financing to several developing countries facing financial and currency crises or possible failure to meet their international debt obligations. The IMF issued more than $400 billion dollars in loans between 1984 and 2003 with ...

  A review of the article titled ‘James E. K. Aggrey: Collaborator, Nationalist, Pan-African’ by Kenneth King In the article titled “ Collaborator, Nationalist, Pan-African ”, King (1969) labors to give a different perspective of the heroism of James Aggrey while at the same time admitting how difficult that task is since among radical Pan-Africanists, he carries the image of a villain. Even to the author, it looks much easier to describe Aggrey as a collaborator compared to trying to portray him as a nationalist or Pan-Africanist. King calls it a kind of Pan-Africanism that has suffered neglect in the face of more combative standpoints of the likes of W.E.B. DuBois and Marcus Garvey. As a collaborator, King asserts that the years Aggrey spent in America as well as touring Africa made him believe he was perfectly suited to connect Africa with Negro America. Celebrated as a ‘Good African’ among the whites, he endeavored to make colonialism tolerable and black revolution untenabl...

  Abstract Each time a new administration takes over in the United States, there is a level of expectation whether good or bad regarding how it will deal with the rest of the world. This paper looks at some of those expectations from Africa by zeroing in on the presidencies of George Walker Bush and his successor Barack Hussein Obama. The first part covers what Africa really wanted followed by the limitations both administrations had to deal with and finally a way forward. What did Africa want? The election of George W. Bush in the year 2000 did not carry a lot of euphoria on the African continent if what we saw in 2008 was anything to go by. During the presidential debates, Bush blatantly stated that Africa was of no strategic importance to the United States only to surprise his critics by implementing policies towards the continent that turned out to be one of his much talked about legacies (Layman and Robinette, 2009). Meanwhile, the election of Barack H. Obama as the 44...

A review of the article titled The Evolution of Operational Code Analysis by  Stephen G. Walker Stephen Walker’s article on “The Evolution of Operational Code Analysis ” aims at documenting the journey operational code analysis has taken starting with the classical works of Nathan Leites to the input of Alexander George and Ole Holsti as well as other scholars who followed thereafter (Walker, 1990, pp. 403). Walker opines that it is Leites who elevated operational code construct into the realms of political psychology with his thesis on The O perational code of the Politburo (1951) and A study of Bolshevism (1953) although he borrowed the term “ operational code ” from Merton. The term was initially a reference to how an individual acquires values or worldviews and its associated responses which are then shared with others within a specific organization. Leites extended this by bringing in pyschocultural analysis of the fundamental motivations and how these varied depending o...

A review of the article titled Foreign Policy Analysis: Actor-Specific Theory and the Ground of International Relations by Valerie M. Hudson In her article on foreign policy analysis, Hudson (2005) endeavors not only to give us the cornerstone of this subfield but makes a case of how relevant it is in providing the basis for all international relations theory. She builds on this by taking us through the actor-specific theory and contrasting it with what she calls actor-general theory as well as identifying the ground of international relations where contemporary theories tend to focus more on states at the expense of individuals or to the very least make it look like everything is about states. The author asserts that when it comes to international relations (IR) as a field of study, whatever goes on between states is grounded in “human decision makers acting singly or in groups” hence it is critical to understand how such individuals interpret and react to the world around them in...

If you asked Jimmy Carter what his foreign policy towards Iran was, you will struggle to get an answer but three things remain clear; he wavered between different opinions hence failed to provide clear guidance to the ‘American’ Shah Mohammad Reza, he was too busy with other key policies to pay attention to Iran and finally it messed him up politically. So who is Jimmy Carter? Smith (2011) calls him one of the most religiously devout presidents who publicly professed his faith in Jesus Christ from a young age. According to McCrisken (2003), Carter rose from a peanut farmer, nuclear engineer and service to the Navy to run for the presidency as an outsider without the baggage of the Vietnam war and Watergate scandal. His only foreign policy experience was being a member of the Trilateral Commission.   Moens (1991) asserts that Carter was elected president in 1976 under the banner of human rights and arms control. His was a moral presidency whereby the forceful use of the military...