1990s–2010s: (Africa and the Post-Cold War World — The Intersection of Old and New Dynamics, the West Becoming More Concerned with Human Rights and Good Gove…

1990s–2010s: (Africa and the Post-Cold War World — The Intersection of Old and New Dynamics, the West Becoming More Concerned with Human Rights and Good Governance After the Berlin Wall, Guilt Over the 1994 Rwandan Genocide Driving Interventionism, SAPs Linking Democratization to Economic Liberalization, Clinton’s 1998 African Renaissance Tour, the War on Terror Reproducing Cold War Patterns of Overlooking Abuses in Exchange for Alliance, and Africa Remaining a Condition to Be Fixed by an Enormous Diplomatic-Humanitarian-Developmental Complex That Is Strikingly Ahistorical): Contemporary Africa must be understood at the intersection of old and new dynamics — current conditions are the outcome of cumulative processes, though comparatively novel shifts in international politics can also be discerned. The end of the Cold War had a major impact: the West became ostensibly more concerned with human rights, good governance, and democracy. This shift arose partly from guilt — the mid-1980s Ethiopian famine became iconic, while inaction during the 1994 Rwandan genocide, when around a million Tutsi and moderate Hutu were killed while the world watched, produced remorseful culpability and comparisons with vigorous intervention in the Balkans. The deal laid before African regimes was that acceptance of structural adjustment programs involving political and economic liberalization would be rewarded with investment and World Bank funds. An apparently new economic orthodoxy was born — though the basic principle of interventionism aimed at modernization could be traced to the early nineteenth century and slave-trade abolition. Clinton’s 1998 tour of sub-Saharan Africa heralded an African renaissance. But after the September 11 attacks, the War on Terror reproduced Cold War patterns — the US was again prepared to overlook shortcomings in exchange for support against Islamic extremism, as with Eritrea and Ethiopia in the coalition against Iraq. Africa remained a condition to be fixed by an enormous diplomatic-humanitarian-developmental complex whose solution-oriented agendas were strikingly ahistorical, containing no hint of historical consciousness about the continent’s long-term underdevelopment.