Articles · Vol. 5 No. 1 (2009): Africa Review of Books, Volume 5, n° 1, 2009 · Pages 8-9

African Prophet or American Poodle?

  • Adekeye Adebajo
    Adekeye Adebajo Executive Director of the Centre for Conflict Resolution (CCR) at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3656-3134 (unauthenticated)
    ADEKEYE ADEBAJO is Executive Director of the Centre for Conflict Resolution (CCR) at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. He is the author of Building Peace in West Africa, and Liberia’s Civil War (both 2002); and co-editor of South Africa in Africa: The Post-Apartheid...
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Abstract

Kofi Annan: A Man of Peace in A World of War by Stanley Meisler. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 2007, 372 pp., $14.78, ISBN: 978-0-471-78744-0
The Best Intentions: Kofi Annan and the UN in the Era of American World Power by James Traub. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006, 442 pp., $26. ISBN: 978-0-374-18220-5

Ghana’s Kofi Annan was the first black African to serve as Secretary-General of the United Nations (UN) – between 1997 and 2006 – and he shared the Nobel Peace Prize with the UN in 2001. During his ten-year tenure, Annan courageously, but perhaps naïvely, championed the cause of ‘humanitarian intervention’. After a steep decline in the mid-1990s, peacekeeping increased again by 2005 to around 80,000 troops, with a budget of $3.2 billion. African countries like Sudan, Congo, Liberia, Ethiopia/Eritrea, and Côte d’Ivoire were the main beneficiaries. Annan also moved the UN bureaucracy from its creative inertia to embrace views and actors from outside the system: mainly civil society and the private sector...

Keywords

African Prophet American Poodle Kofi Annan

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Author Biography

  • Adekeye Adebajo, Executive Director of the Centre for Conflict Resolution (CCR) at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.

    ADEKEYE ADEBAJO is Executive Director of the Centre for Conflict Resolution (CCR) at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. He is the author of Building Peace in West Africa, and Liberia’s Civil War (both 2002); and co-editor of South Africa in Africa: The Post-Apartheid Era (2007).

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Vol. 5 No. 1 (2009): Africa Review of Books, Volume 5, n° 1, 2009 →