AFRICAN REGIONAL ORGANISATION' PEACE OPERATIONS

This paper reviews recent developments among African regional organisations in undertaking peacekeeping operations, as well as in preparing for future missions. It focuses on those that have been the most active: the Organisation of African Unity/African Union, the Economic Community of West African States and the Southern African Development Community. The paper goes on to briefly describe and analyse the activities of the French, UK, and US capacity-building programmes designed to develop African peacekeeping capacities. The author then identifies some specific concerns and recommends actions to help meet today's challenges. The paper concludes with a short analysis of African organisations' capacities and proclivities to provide a peacekeeping force for Sudan.     

REGIONAL PERSPECTIVES ON LOW NUCLEAR NUMBERS

President Barack Obama has outlined a course toward lower numbers of US nuclear weapons. Much attention has been paid to the US-Russian context, where deterrence is believed to be basically stable and conditions ripe for gradually reducing arsenals on both sides. But considerably less attention has been paid to the possible implications of lower nuclear numbers on other regions of the world and the reactions of both adversaries and US allies. If nuclear reductions are to be stabilizing and beneficial to security, reassurance and strengthened nonproliferation efforts in various regions need to accompany nuclear cuts. But the specific problems and remedies across regions vary. This article summarizes the results of a multi-author study. It concludes that regions with US allies and formal extended deterrence pledges may pose more vexing problems than those areas of the world without such close allies or commitments.     

THE USE OF REGIONAL DIAMOND TRADING PLATFORMS TO ACCESS CONFLICT ZONES

Rough diamonds are one of the easiest minerals to extract from a war zone. Their high value to weight ratio means that a significant investment can be suitably concealed to evade detection. This attribute generally makes researchers assume that diamond smuggling from war zones to international trading centers is impossible to control—that the illicit diamond trade is like a river, which when confronted with an obstacle, will always find an alternative channel. This is true for the multitudes of African middlemen who smuggle varying amounts of diamonds across porous borders. International dealers who purchase diamonds from war zones are, however, much more constrained in their business and must rely on a limited number of routes to access rebel territory. These dealers almost always use operating platforms in a reasonable geographical proximity to the war zone to facilitate access to rebel groups, transfer cash to diamond buying operations, physically remove diamonds from the buying zone and organise their onward transfer to the legal international market. The multitude of networks that could deal with one particular rebel group and their infinite number of international hideouts is constricted to a bottleneck in these regional diamond trading platforms, without which access to rebel groups is either impossible or becomes a highly costly affair. This paper will consider the principle regional mechanisms by which diamond dealers organise, finance, orchestrate and conceal their business dealings with African rebel groups. Conflict diamond dealers interviewed by the author expressed economic rather than political motivation for their business activities, and in this context this paper will analyse why they have chosen regional operating platforms that conform to regional political alliances.