ABSTRACT
Although the United Nations (UN) conducted one of its most costly and difficult Cold War missions in the Congo (1960-1964), it did not deploy another mission in Africa until 1988 when it sent peacekeepers to Angola to monitor the Cuban withdrawal. Since then, however, Africa has witnessed a huge increase in the number, size and complexity of peacekeeping operations. These operations proliferated in two senses: first, nearly twenty African states ended up hosting one or more of the approximately sixty different peacekeeping operations that were deployed between 1990 and 2009; second, a majority of African states became troop-contributing countries to one or more of those operations. Peacekeeping thus became a significant part of Africa’s post-Cold War political landscape.
