Abstract
The 1970s and 1980s, in most of Africa, were decades of festering authoritarianism exemplified by militarism, despotism and repression. This debilitating state of affairs was not helped by the Cold War under which Africa was the beautiful bride of rival ideological blocs, as Mamdani notes in Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, that the Cold War was indeed a Hot War in Africa not with the numerous proxy wars waged in countries such as Angola (UNITA) and Mozambique (FRELIMO). To widen their respective geo-strategic and ideological support-base, the United States of America and the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR) turned blind eyes to undemocratic practices of their various allies, and in some cases supported the same. The international best practices at the time were rooted in a modern anachronism called “non-interference in domestic affairs of nations”; this provided a convenient leeway and justification for international inaction against dictatorship and militarism, worldwide.
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Odukoya, A., Momoh, A. (2022). Democracy and Demilitarization in Africa: Towards a Reconceptualization. In: Oloruntoba, S.O. (eds) The Political Economy of Colonialism and Nation-Building in Nigeria. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73875-4_12
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