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

According to Gilson (2007), Japan’s Peace Consolidation Diplomacy is meant to advance the state’s international profile while tackling domestic pressure over best use of aid and the role of the Japanese military in the international arena. For a country that has been nominated over ten times as a non-permanent member to the United Nations Security Council, more international engagement is necessary since Japan’s desire to be a permanent member on the Council is no secret. Peace Consolidation Diplomacy is not limited to Japan but is more of a global debate or tact in opting to combine humanitarian intervention and aid with peacekeeping. Japan’s Peace Consolidation Diplomacy has three pillars with the first being promotion of the peace process which can be through mediation or election assistance, the second pillar is accomplishing domestic stability and security through activities such as disarmament, demobilization as well as removal of landmines and the final pillar is humanitarian ...

In the period 1947 to 1988, there was an ideological battle between the United States and the Soviet Union which dominated international politics with the former aiming at the global containment of communism. On the other hand, anticolonial nationalism was taking place in Africa which was under Western European imperial control hence becoming a target for the two contending powers. The liberation struggle that followed led to the demise of colonialism and attainment of independence by African states (Ohaegbulam, 1992). The United States’ fear of the spread of communism got them involved in a number of domestic politics that escalated the civil wars and inter-state conflicts in places like Zaire between 1960 to 1978, Angola from 1975 to 1988, and the Ogaden war between Ethiopia and Somalia from 1977 to 1978. The bearers of American interests on the continent included rebel leaders such as Jonas Savimbi in Angola while those who were looked at as a threat to those interests among them ...

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...