Sunday, February 15, 2009

Resist Africom: the movie

This movie does not acknowledge that fully half of the US ability to do development work is now orchestrated through the department of defense and the US armed forces. This policy makes sense in Iraq and Afghanistan where development is seen as one of the three pillars of 'success' and the sustainability of peace after US withdrawal. Africom is different though. The US is not currently engaged in large scale conflict on the African continent, so I think that state-building and development done at the tip of the most powerful sword in human history is an unnecessary militarization of development work.

I found the video through a radical pan-African literary journal out of South Africa. This is not an unbiased documentary. Its political agenda raises some interesting questions though; it makes me think of the logical extensions from, or extrapolations on, Ayittey's and Collier's work on corruption and conflict traps respectively. The video is well produced and worth a watch.
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