Africa's first peacekeeping operation: the OAU in Chad, 1981-1982

The quest to better understand the Organization of African Unity's (OAU) peacekeeping missions to Chad (1980 and 1981-1982) led me to four countries on three continents. Most scholars have concentrated their work on the popular United Nations peacekeeping operations. However, much can be learned from the peacekeeping missions fielded by regional and sub-regional international organizations. The purpose of this book is to help fill a research gap by regional and sub-regional international organizations. The purpose of this book is to help fill a research gap by providing a detailed examination of the OAU's peace-keeping operations in Chad (as well as the Nigerian unilateral peacekeeping force in 1979) and try to explain why regional international organizations mandate multinational peacekeeping operations. I participated in a project led by Drs. Karl Magyar and Earl Conteh-Morgan to examine the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) operation in Liberia known as ECOMOG (ECOWAS Monitoring Group). The collective effort of the team led to a book edited by Magyar and Conteh-Morgan that presented a comprehensive examination of ECOMOG's early years. The significance of state foreign policies in the formation of ECOMOG emerged from the case studies. While this book examines the two OAU operations in Chad, I encourage other scholars to review the decision-making policies of Middle-Eastern countries in the Arab League's peacekeeping operations in Kuwait and Lebanon. The names of countries in this book reflect those utilize during the period from 1979 to 1982. Thus, readers will notice the use of the Ivory Coast (Cote d'Ivoire), Zaire (Democratic Republic of the Congo), and Upper Volta (Burkina Faso) rather than their modern versions.