Emizet Kisangani and Jeffrey Pickering have surely provided the definitive statement about interstate interventions in Africa. Given the low frequency of interstate war in Africa, they may have provided the definitive statement on interstate conflict in Africa. Their book commands respect because of the expertise the authors bring as creators of the Interstate Military Interventions (IMI) database upon which they rely, and also because Kisangani is a noted specialist in African international relations and because Pickering is widely regarded for his quantitative analyses of international politics (often in collaboration with Kisangani). Theirs is a fruitful pairing, and this book will be of enormous value to anyone curious about the frequencies of interventions in Africa or in the causal patterns associated with those interventions.
The book’s organization emphasizes different types of intervenors and interventions in Africa. The authors begin with a substantial introductory chapter that not only describes the rich variety of African intervenors and interventions but also lays out their theoretical expectations and provides a quantitative assessment of the IMI data in Africa. They then present a series of chapters discussing each intervention/intervenor type: progressing from noncolonial interventions to interventions by former colonizers, to interventions by one African state against the government of another African state, to interventions by one African state in support of another African state and concluding with interventions into failed states in Africa. In each of these focused chapters, the authors provide a particularly rich historical narrative, and then use Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) to tease out necessary and sufficient causal patterns within each intervention/intervenor type.
Kisangani and Pickering’s theoretical expectations are multifaceted as well. They draw hypotheses from diversionary theory, from what they call “rebel movement theory,” and from role theory. The first argument anticipates that intervening states often do so to divert attention within their country from domestic problems of economic downturns and societal discord. The second argument anticipates that interventions in Africa will often be motivated by, and frequently targeted at, rebel groups from the intervening state that have gained refuge in the state receiving the intervention. Role theory anticipates that some states self-identify as more active or more important than others, and that these states with a more expansive sense of their international role are more frequent intervenors. The authors’ presentations of these theoretical arguments are clear and include references to a wide range of past research related to these theories, which is useful for those learning about them here.
As indicated in the preceding text, Kisangani and Pickering use a mixed-methods approach to assess their hypotheses. In Chapter 1 they provide a series of large-N statistical models in which they find some support for each of their hypotheses (depending on intervention and intervenor type). In the detailed chapters that follow, they provide rich historical narratives of each type of intervention/intervenor. They also undertake QCA assessments of whether the variables that identified with their hypotheses qualify as necessary or sufficient conditions. I will not try to summarize their findings because which hypotheses are supported and how strong the support varied considerably across intervention and intervenor types. But I do agree with their general assessment that all three theoretical arguments are useful for understanding interventions in Africa.
One finding is especially interesting to me as a student of international relations. Specifically, Kisangani and Pickering find considerable support for diversionary expectations with all three of their assessment strategies and in a range of intervention/intervenor types. Domestic unrest makes African states more likely to intervene in their neighbors’ affairs. What I find especially interesting here is that the diversionary theory is notorious for its lack of broad empirical support. IR scholars have suggested many reasons why diversionary theory enjoys such weak support. A new possibility suggested by Kisangani and Pickering may be that the belligerent behaviors of domestically troubled states often involve interventions that do not qualify as wars or other types of interstate conflict.
While I find a great deal to admire in this book, there are, nevertheless, two interrelated aspects of it that I think might have been improved. First, more detail might have been provided about the statistical analysis. For example, I assume that they are studying what other scholars would call relevant dyads: pairs of contiguous states and pairs of states with at least one major power. But given the large number of dyads this refers to in Africa (and in Latin American and Asia, areas included for cross-regional comparisons) for the 50+ years of their temporal coverage, I believe the sample sizes should be much larger. Additionally, it appears that only neighboring states and non-African states that have, at some point, intervened in Africa are included as potential intervenors. Such a case-selection strategy raises concerns about selection bias, which the authors claim to address with a matching technique. But little detail about that matching procedure is provided. Kisangani and Pickering likely deemphasize coverage of their statistical results because earlier in Chapter 1 they make a strong argument about why standard quantitative IR approaches are troublesome, perhaps even undesirable, in analyses of Africa. Their reservations are understandable but do not necessitate a paucity of detail.
My second concern is that the authors’ claims of African exceptionalism are not very well substantiated. In fact, they rely exclusively on the quantitative analyses in Chapter 1 to support their claim that African interventions are different. For example, they claim that the control variables included in the statistical analyses perform differently in Asian and Latin American analyses than they do in Africa. In particular, we are told that an indicator of whether the target state is rich in diamonds is associated with a higher risk of intervention only in Africa because the coefficient for this variable is insignificant for Asia and Latin America. This is a weak basis for claiming that Africa’s interventions are so distinct they require separate study. I suspect that had a more general indicator of lootable wealth been included, this alleged difference across regions would not persist. In the series of chapters that follow about different intervention and intervenor types, the rest of the world is not mentioned. Kisangani and Pickering hang most of their conclusions on the historical narratives and QCA assessments, and as a result we really do not know if African interventions are distinct.
I suspect that African international relations are distinct in many ways from patterns found in other regions. But I wish this had been better substantiated because a consistent conceptual lever supporting their expectations is border fixity. The near-inviolability of interstate borders after 1945 is not exclusive to Africa (President Putin nevertheless notwithstanding). What, then, makes Africa exceptional? I just wish Kisangani and Pickering had made a stronger case. Of course, there is only so much one can accomplish in one volume. Had Kisangani and Pickering not restricted themselves primarily to Africa we would not learn so much about African interventions and, to be sure, we do learn a great deal about that here. This is now the book about military interventions in Africa; it has no peers.
