Book launch: African Peacekeeping

Going beyond the question of why post-conflict states contribute troops to peacekeeping efforts, Jonathan Fisher and Nina Wilén demonstrate how peacekeeping is – and has been – weaved into Africa's national, regional and international politics more broadly, as well as what implications this has for how we should understand the continent, its history and its politics. In doing so, and drawing on fieldwork undertaken in every region of the continent, Fisher and Wilén explain how profoundly this involvement in peacekeeping has shaped contemporary Africa.

Exploring the story of Africa's contemporary history and politics through the lens of peacekeeping, this concise and accessible book, based on over a decade of research across ten countries, focuses not on peacekeeping in Africa but, rather, peacekeeping by Africans

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Speaker biographies

Jonathan Fisher is Professor of Global Security at the University of Birmingham. He was educated at the Universities of London and Oxford and was Head of the International Development Department at Birmingham between 2016-2017 and 2020-2022, as well as co-editor of Civil Wars between 2017-2022. He is the author of East Africa after Liberation: Conflict, Security and the State since the 1980s (Cambridge University Press, 2020) and co-author of Authoritarian Africa (Oxford University Press, 2019). His research focuses on the relationships between authoritarianism and (in)security.

Nina Wilèn is Director of the Africa Programme at the Egmont Institute and Associate Professor at the University of Antwerp. She is also a Global Fellow at the Peace Research Institute in Oslo (PRIO). She is the author of Justifying Interventions: (De)Stabilising Sovereignty (Routledge, 2012) and Editor-in-Chief of International Peacekeeping. Her research focuses on peacekeeping, military intervention, and gender.

Chair: Prof Phil Clark (SOAS)

Organiser: SOAS Centre of African Studies

Contact email: cas@soas.ac.uk