The Future of African Peace Operations: From the Janjaweed to Boko Haram

Facing threats ranging from Islamist insurgences to the Ebola pandemic, African regional actors are playing an increasingly vital role in safeguarding peace and stability across the continent.  But while the African Union has demonstrated its ability to deploy forces on short notice and in difficult circumstances, the challenges posed by increasingly complex conflict zones have revealed a widening divide between the theory and practice of peacekeeping.  With the AU's African Standby Force becoming fully operational in 2016, this timely and much-needed work argues that responding to these challenges will require a new and distinctively African model of peacekeeping, as well as a radical revision of the current African security framework....