A deep change in the vision, and the practice of peacekeeping and the maintenance of collective security is currently taking place with the creation of the Peace and Security Council, by the African Union. Indeed, the birth of this new framework for promoting collective security and peace on the scale of the African continent seals an important evolution : the use of military force in conflict settlement is now considered ; this amounts to institutionalizing power in African international (...)  lire suite

The key to conflict settlement and exiting crises in Africa resides in the faculty of disarming belligerents and reinserting them into a normalised social life. The particular African context makes this process an especially difficult one ; moreover, it is undermined by mutually exclusive individual interests. The role of international organisation, the UN in particular, proves to be decisive, even if different approaches are necessary. Bilateral conflict settlement may prove to be, in this (...)  lire suite

The French intervention in the Ivory Coast crisis revives the interventionnist tradition of France in Africa and sketches the first lines of a new type of French commitment on the Dark Continent by initiating new intervention principles (a regional and comprehensive multilateralization of the conflict). The French intervention has a mixed outcome : it has allowed preventing the burst of a true open war but the Ivory Coast has not recovered its peace since, almost two years after the (...)  lire suite

The bloody conflict in the Ivory Coast was subjected to various interpretations, which influenced France’s perception and relationship with the actors of the crisis. Beyond a political strategy that appeared as fluctuating, the methods of the French involvement in Ivory Coast seem to break with the practices of the past ; henceforth, they are to be included in the framework of a new doctrine of crisis management in African countries. This evolution, that has been underlying since the (...)  lire suite

The successor to the AUO, the African Union has the ambition of reviving and consolidating the economical and political integration project planned in 1963. In this perspective, the new organisation constitutive Act, defined in the Syrte Declaration (Lybia) on September 9th, 1999, has set objectives and institutional limits going farther than the AUO diplomatic approach. The changes especially concern bodies : for instance, a Commission is responsible for the dynamics of unity ; the creation (...)  lire suite

In Africa, formal and informal activities are intertwined. The duality between urban areas, connected up to modern networks, and rural areas which are completely remote, depending on local energy : on man and his environment, is a fundamental obstacle to development. Is this global context an asset, or a handicap for the establishment of NICT ? While the liberalization of economies would seem to favour new technologies, the dematerialisation of wireless technology may be of particular (...)  lire suite

At the end of the 1990s, the African Heads of State and Government had become aware of the continent delay and of the deadlock of the multiple plans of development passed, and decided to take their own destiny in their hands again. They took the initiative of the thought on development, in order to take up the challenges of globalization and the 21st century. Within the framework of the reform of the Organisation of African Unity, they promote an African vision of the development through (...)  lire suite