Download or read book Liberia and the United States during the Cold War written by D. Dunn and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At once a diplomatic history and case study of African foreign policy and presidential leadership, this book illustrates how development and security assistance were used by the US as antidotes against communism in the Cold War and how Liberia was able occasionally to profit from the arrangement.

Download or read book Liberia written by Gabriel I. H. Williams and published by Trafford Publishing. This book was released on 2002 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On December 24, 1989, a group of Libyan-trained armed dissidents, which styled itself the National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL), attacked Liberian territory from neighboring Ivory Coast. The band of outlaws was led by Charles Taylor, an ex-Liberia government official who escaped from prison in the United States while facing extradition to Liberia for allegedly embezzling nearly one million dollars of public funds. After he fled the U.S. Taylor returned to West Africa, from where he connected with Libya. Sustained by Libyan support, Taylor went to Liberia to spearhead his murderous brand of civil war. Liberia's dictatorial leader Samuel Doe responded to the NPFL invasion by deploying troops in the conflict area, whose senior ranks were dominated by the military strongman's own ethnic group. The government forces carried out collective punishment against local villagers, killing, looting, and raping, while singling out people from certain ethnic groups whom they regarded as supporters of the invasion by reason of their ethnic identity. The NPFL also targeted members of Doe's ethnic group and other ethnic groups that were seen to be supportive of the government, as well as its officials and sympathizers. As the war spread from the interior toward the Liberian capital of Monrovia amid widespread death and destruction, the United States responded to the deteriorating situation by dispatching four warships with 2,300 marines to evacuate Americans and other foreigners who were in the country. The U.S. decided not to intervene to contain the unfolding catastrophe. Officials of the George Bush administration maintained that Liberia, which was then America's closest traditional ally in Africa, was no longer of strategic importance to the U.S. Coincidentally, the Liberian civil war started at the time the Cold War was ending. Located on the West Coast of Africa, Liberia was founded in 1822 by freed black American slaves who were returned to the continent. Their passage was paid by the American Colonization Society, a philanthropic organization, whose members included Thomas Jefferson and James Monroe. The Liberian capital Monrovia is named after Monroe, who was president of the United States at the time Liberia was founded. The country's national flag of red, white and blue stripes with a star, bears close resemblance to the American flag. The systems of government and education, architecture and other aspects of Liberian life reflect American taste. Names of places in the country include Virginia, Maryland, Georgia, Louisiana and Buchanan. More than anywhere in Africa, spoken English in Liberia echoes the rhythms of Black American speech. Liberia served as the regional headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and hosted a Voice of America relay station that beamed American propaganda, as well as other major U.S. security installations during the Cold War. The Americans also operated the Omega Navigation Tower, which was intended to track the movement of ships and planes in the region and beyond. Once one of Africa's most stable and prosperous countries, Liberia was regarded as a haven for international trade and commerce because of the use of the American dollar as a legal tender. Major U.S. investments in the country included the Firestone Rubber Plantation, the world's largest plantation, which produce rubber for Firestone tires, Chase Manhattan Bank, and Citibank. Pan American Airlines (PAN AM) once operated Liberia's Roberts International Airport, where U.S. fighter jets have landing rights. During part of the 1970s, Liberia's per capita income was equivalent to that of Japan. Independent since 1847 as Africa's first republic, Liberia's plunge into anarchy began after a bloody military coup that ended the rule of descendants of the freed slaves, who monopolized political and economic power for over a century. During the 1980 coup, President William Tolbert, who tried to institute some meaningful po

Download or read book Two Centuries of US Military Operations in Liberia written by Niels Hahn and published by . This book was released on 2020-03-31 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book reviews the history of the United States-Liberia relations from the early 1820s to 2015, with particular attention paid to the role of the US armed forces. Contrary to most literature on the genesis and development of Liberia, this book demonstrates how US military power has been the primary influence shaping Liberia's history. This includes the role played by the US military in the founding of Liberia, the protection of the country during the European formal colonial era, multiple covert operations in securing US-friendly administrations in Liberia, and direct military interventions when necessary to secure American interests in the region.

Download or read book Listen Politics is Not for Children written by Henryatta Louise Ballah and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Abstract: This dissertation explores the historical causes of the Liberian civil war (1989-2003), with a keen attention to the history of Liberian youth, since the beginning of the Republic in 1847. I carefully analyzed youth engagements in social and political change throughout the country's history, including the ways by which the civil war impacted the youth and inspired them to create new social and economic spaces for themselves. As will be demonstrated in various chapters, despite their marginalization by the state, the youth have played a crucial role in the quest for democratization in the country, especially since the 1960s. I place my analysis of the youth in deep societal structures related to Liberia's colonial past and neo-colonial status, as well as the impact of external factors, such as the financial and military support the regime of Samuel Doe received from the United States during the cold war and the influence of other African nations. I emphasize that the socio-economic and political policies implemented by the Americo-Liberians (freed slaves from the U.S.) who settled in the country beginning in 1822, helped lay the foundation for the civil war. I also argue that the oppressive regime of Samuel Kanyon Doe (1980-1990), the first indigenous non-settler president of Liberia, failed to address the prevailing social, economic and political inequalities that had been fostered by the Americo-Liberians, and this failure provided additional impetus that ignited what seemed clearly to be a time-bomb waiting to explode due to the deep inequality in Liberian society, an inequality that had made a segment of the society already angry with the political status quo. The youth of Liberia were among those who resented the political status quo fostered by the Americo-Liberians and later entrenched by the Doe regime. Thus, contrary to prevailing notions in the bulk of the existing literature that depicts the youth as innocent people drawn into civil conflicts against their will, I argue that Liberian youth considered themselves active members of their society, who must contribute to its transformation even if that meant picking up arms against corrupt leaders.

Download or read book The African American Voice in U S Foreign Policy Since World War II written by Michael L. Krenn and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-08-08 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following World War II, America was witness to two great struggles. The first was on the international front and involved the fight for freedom around the globe, as millions of people in Asia and Africa rose up to throw off their European colonial masters. In the decades following 1945 dozens of new nations joined the ranks of independent countries. Following the Civil War, the African-American voice in U.S. foreign affairs continued to grow. In the late nineteenth century, a few African-Americans — such as Frederick Douglass — even served as U.S. diplomats to the "black republics" of Liberia and Haiti. When America began its overseas thrust during the 1890s, African-American opinion was divided.

Download or read book The Burden of Collective Goodwill written by Abiodun Alao and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book is the first to discuss in detail the extensive external involvement in the Liberian civil war, a war that claimed up to 200,000 lives, created a massive refuge crisis and brought West Africa to the tribunal of international attention. The book is conceived against the background that the international response to the conflict has features that are unprecedented in the management of civil conflicts in the post-cold war era. For example, the regional peacekeeping mission was the first after the end of the cold war, while the dispatch of UN Observer mission was the first ever joint peacekeeping mission between the UN and a regional organisation. The extensive involvement of international organisations in the conflict has not been witnessed in the region since the Biafran war of 1967-1970.

Download or read book The Cold War and the Color Line written by Thomas BORSTELMANN and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After World War II the United States faced two preeminent challenges: how to administer its responsibilities abroad as the world's strongest power, and how to manage the rising movement at home for racial justice and civil rights. The effort to contain the growing influence of the Soviet Union resulted in the Cold War, a conflict that emphasized the American commitment to freedom. The absence of that freedom for nonwhite American citizens confronted the nation's leaders with an embarrassing contradiction. Racial discrimination after 1945 was a foreign as well as a domestic problem. World War II opened the door to both the U.S. civil rights movement and the struggle of Asians and Africans abroad for independence from colonial rule. America's closest allies against the Soviet Union, however, were colonial powers whose interests had to be balanced against those of the emerging independent Third World in a multiracial, anticommunist alliance. At the same time, U.S. racial reform was essential to preserve the domestic consensus needed to sustain the Cold War struggle. The Cold War and the Color Line is the first comprehensive examination of how the Cold War intersected with the final destruction of global white supremacy. Thomas Borstelmann pays close attention to the two Souths--Southern Africa and the American South--as the primary sites of white authority's last stand. He reveals America's efforts to contain the racial polarization that threatened to unravel the anticommunist western alliance. In so doing, he recasts the history of American race relations in its true international context, one that is meaningful and relevant for our own era of globalization. Table of Contents: Preface Prologue 1. Race and Foreign Relations before 1945 2. Jim Crow's Coming Out 3. The Last Hurrah of the Old Color Line 4. Revolutions in the American South and Southern Africa 5. The Perilous Path to Equality 6. The End of the Cold War and White Supremacy Epilogue Notes Archives and Manuscript Collections Index Reviews of this book: In rich, informing detail enlivened with telling anecdote, Cornell historian Borstelmann unites under one umbrella two commonly separated strains of the U.S. post-WWII experience: our domestic political and cultural history, where the Civil Rights movement holds center stage, and our foreign policy, where the Cold War looms largest...No history could be more timely or more cogent. This densely detailed book, wide ranging in its sources, contains lessons that could play a vital role in reshaping American foreign and domestic policy. --Publishers Weekly Reviews of this book: [Borstelmann traces] the constellation of racial challenges each administration faced (focusing particularly on African affairs abroad and African American civil rights at home), rather than highlighting the crises that made headlines...By avoiding the crutch of "turning points" for storytelling convenience, he makes a convincing case that no single event can be untied from a constantly thickening web of connections among civil rights, American foreign policy, and world affairs. --Jesse Berrett, Village Voice Reviews of this book: Borstelmann...analyzes the history of white supremacy in relation to the history of the Cold War, with particular emphasis on both African Americans and Africa. In a book that makes a good supplement to Mary Dudziak's Cold War Civil Rights, he dissects the history of U.S. domestic race relations and foreign relations over the past half-century...This book provides new insights into the dynamics of American foreign policy and international affairs and will undoubtedly be a useful and welcome addition to the literature on U.S. foreign policy and race relations. Recommended. --Edward G. McCormack, Library Journal

Download or read book Liberia Will Rise Again written by Arthur Kulah and published by Abingdon Press. This book was released on 1999-04-01 with total page 119 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For seven years, Liberia was involved in a civil war that cost the lives of more than 200,000 people. That war ended on January 31, 1997. Liberia Will Rise Again outlines the causes of the war, interprets the present situation, and offers suggestions for the future. KEY BENEFITS: * Provides a better understanding of the civil war in Liberia * Shows how the Liberians may have contributed to the problem * Helps readers learn about the treatment of refugees * Discusses issues related to the civil war and suggests lessons to be learned from the bitter experience

Download or read book The Cold War on the Periphery written by Robert J. McMahon and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 1996-06-13 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on the two tumultuous decades framed by Indian independence in 1947 and the Indo-Pakistani war of 1965, The Cold War on the Periphery explores the evolution of American policy toward the subcontinent. McMahon analyzes the motivations behind America's pursuit of Pakistan and India as strategic Cold War prizes. He also examines the profound consequences—for U.S. regional and global foreign policy and for South Asian stability—of America's complex political, military, and economic commitments on the subcontinent. McMahon argues that the Pakistani-American alliance, consummated in 1954, was a monumental strategic blunder. Secured primarily to bolster the defense perimeter in the Middle East, the alliance increased Indo-Pakistani hostility, undermined regional stability, and led India to seek closer ties with the Soviet Union. Through his examination of the volatile region across four presidencies, McMahon reveals the American strategic vision to have been "surprinsgly ill defined, inconsistent, and even contradictory" because of its exaggerated anxiety about the Soviet threat and America's failure to incorporate the interests and concerns of developing nations into foreign policy. The Cold War on the Periphery addresses fundamental questions about the global reach of postwar American foreign policy. Why, McMahon asks, did areas possessing few of the essential prerequisites of economic-military power become objects of intense concern for the United States? How did the national security interests of the United States become so expansive that they extended far beyond the industrial core nations of Western Europe and East Asia to embrace nations on the Third World periphery? And what combination of economic, political, and ideological variables best explain the motives that led the United States to seek friends and allies in virtually every corner of the planet? McMahon's lucid analysis of Indo-Pakistani-Americna relations powerfully reveals how U.S. policy was driven, as he puts it, "by a series of amorphous—and largely illusory—military, strategic, and psychological fears" about American vulnerability that not only wasted American resources but also plunged South Asia into the vortex of the Cold War.

Download or read book America s Cold War written by Campbell Craig and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-14 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A creative, carefully researched, and incisive analysis of U.S. strategy during the long struggle against the Soviet Union.” —Stephen M. Walt, Foreign Policy “Craig and Logevall remind us that American foreign policy is decided as much by domestic pressures as external threats. America’s Cold War is history at its provocative best.” —Mark Atwood Lawrence, author of The Vietnam War The Cold War dominated world affairs during the half century following World War II. America prevailed, but only after fifty years of grim international struggle, costly wars in Korea and Vietnam, trillions of dollars in military spending, and decades of nuclear showdowns. Was all of that necessary? In this new edition of their landmark history, Campbell Craig and Fredrik Logevall engage with recent scholarship on the late Cold War, including the Reagan and Bush administrations and the collapse of the Soviet regime, and expand their discussion of the nuclear revolution and origins of the Vietnam War. Yet they maintain their original argument: that America’s response to a very real Soviet threat gave rise to a military and political system in Washington that is addicted to insecurity and the endless pursuit of enemies to destroy. America’s Cold War speaks vividly to debates about forever wars and threat inflation at the center of American politics today.

Download or read book Africa in the Post Cold War International System written by Sola Akinrinade and published by Burns & Oates. This book was released on 1998-05-31 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Africa in the Post-Cold War International System is an informed, critical and comprehensive analysis of the impact of the end of the Cold War on Africa and the attempts by African states to adjust to the emerging international order.

Download or read book The United States and Africa written by Macharia Munene and published by East African Publishers. This book was released on 1995 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Liberia written by John-Peter Pham and published by Reed Press(NY). This book was released on 2004 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In this utterly depressing account of the west African nation's history and politics, scholar and diplomat Pham offers a cautionary tale regarding Western intervention in Africa. Colonized by free American blacks in the early 19th century, Liberia has long been beset by tensions, not only among its native populations but between natives and the descendants of its Western colonizers. But Pham is no knee-jerk blame-the-West critic- far from it. As he points out, Western investment, by Firestone and other rubber companies, "served as the principal catalyst for Liberia's infrastructure." The author does, however, acknowledge that the workers were paid little for the labor that enriched the rubber companies, and that tribal chiefs were given a cut for the toil of their villagers. Liberia's worst times have come in the past two decades, with rampant corruption and civil war. In Pham's eyes, nation-states have failed, in Liberia and elsewhere in Africa, for a variety of reasons: tribal and ethnic tensions and the end of the Cold War, which allowed weak states propped up by the superpowers to tumble. Pham argues that these states must take responsibility for their own reconstruction and reconstitution as democratic nations, without Western intervention, if they are ever to emerge from their current struggle"--from Publisher's Weekly, quoted on amazon.com.

Download or read book The Future of Democracy and Governance in Liberia written by Createspace Independent Pub and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2017-11-07 with total page 80 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Of the more than 50 nations in Africa, the United States has the closest connection with the Republic of Liberia. This is not only because Liberia was founded in 1847 by freed men and former slaves from this country, but also because of the estimated 500,000 Liberians and Liberian descendants who live here. Liberian cities such as Monrovia and Buchanan were named for American Presidents. Most Americans are largely unaware of the long link between United States and Liberia. Liberia has been a major U.S. ally since World War II and into the Cold War, hosting U.S. communications facilities in the 1960s and 1970s, and has received extensive U.S. development assistance including post-war aid and Ebola aid to Liberia. The United States has also helped Liberia build its criminal justice sector and supported transitional justice efforts. U.S. has funded just over a quarter of the cost of United Nations Mission in Liberia (UNMIL) at a cost of about $106 million annually as of fiscal year 2016. The United States is a key provider of technical assistance to Liberia's national election commission including the International Foundation for Electoral Systems program funded by USAID and the U.N. Development Programme backed by nearly $12 million in mostly European Union funding under a multi-faceted project from 2015 to 2018. Our Government has a significant investment in Liberia on several fronts. The future direction of Liberia is important to the United States. We have a stake in the next government, building on the advances made in the democracy and governance under President Johnson Sirleaf, which followed the despotic rule of Charles Taylor, who was accused and convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity as a result of his involvement in the Sierra Leone civil war from 1991 to 2002.

Download or read book Beneath the Cold War written by Sadie L. DeShield and published by Professional Press (NC). This book was released on 1999-01-01 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book US Policy Toward Africa written by Herman J. Cohen and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Herman Cohen draws on both the documentary record and his years of on-the-ground experience to provide a uniquely comprehensive survey and interpretation of nearly eight decades of US policy toward Africa. Tracing how this policy has evolved across successive administrations since 1942 (beginning with President Franklin D. Roosevelt's third term in office), Cohen illuminates the debates that have taken place at the highest levels of government; shows how policy toward Africa has been affected over the years by US relations with Europe, the Soviet Union, the Middle East, and most recently China; and points to the increasing reliance of Western economic interests on Africa's natural resources. His deeply informed narrative reveals the roles not only of circumstance and ideology, but also of personalities, in the formulation and implementation of US foreign policy.

Download or read book Liberia under Samuel Doe 1980 1985 written by Yekutiel Gershoni and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-03-28 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On April 12, 1980, a group of soldiers led by Master Sergeant Samuel K. Doe executed a bloody coup that put an end to the Americo-Liberian minority regime in Liberia, transforming Africa’s first republic into a military dictatorship. In Liberia under Samuel Doe, 1980-1985: The Politics of Personal Rule, Yekutiel Gershoni examines the evolution and effects of Samuel K. Doe’s reign in Liberia. Gershoni shows Doe’s path to absolute power, corruption, and dictatorship and the economic crises and political turmoil that ensued, even after his murder in 1990. Liberia under Samuel Doe also examines the role of the United States as Liberia’s closest ally, detailing how Doe managed to attract American diplomatic and military support due to U.S. interests in the Cold War. Through in-depth research, primary sources, and interviews with diplomats, politicians, and activists, Gershoni carefully details the timeline of Doe’s rise to power and the lasting effects of his dictatorial legacy.