Do Regional Organizations Matter? Comparing the Conflict Management Mechanisms in West Africa and the Great Lakes Region

In the decade that has elapsed since the end of the Cold War, even the most optimistic assessment of the African interstate system would concede that sub-Saharan Africa sits uncomfortably in a precarious and oftentimes unpredictable security environment. To be sure, there has been a palpable diminution of insecurity, real or imagined, in much of southern Africa since South Africa successfully ended apartheid and rejoined the community of nations in the early 1990s. In East Africa, Uganda’s painfully prolonged civil war ended, for the most part, with Yoweri Museveni consolidating his power and emerging thereafter as a regional power player. In central Africa, a remarkable rebirth is taking place right at the very locus of one of the worst tragedies on the continent. The genocide against Rwanda’s Tutsi population has since produced a constellation of forces that have now made possible the process of building a nation-state along the classical European model where empirical and juridical sovereignty intersect. The state that is emerging in Rwanda now is being built from the bottom-up and, in the process, leaving no doubt as to the source of power; namely, the victorious RPF. In the DRC—formerly Zaire—Mobutu Sese Seko was finally driven out of office by Laurent Kabila, who was himself summarily denied the opportunity to repeat the insanity of prolonged despotism. As the columnist Jim Hoagland put it rather bluntly; Kabila “did not lift a finger to raise his country out of its pitiable ruins.”