Major flaws in conflict prevention policies towards Africa : the conceptual deficits of international actors’ approaches and how to overcome them

Current thinking on African conflicts suffers from misinterpretations oversimplification, lack of focus, lack of conceptual clarity, state-centrism and lack of vision). The paper analyses a variety of the dominant explanations of major international actors and donors, showing how these frequently do not distinguish with sufficient clarity between the ‘root causes’ of a conflict, its aggravating factors and its triggers. Specifically, a correct assessment of conflict prolonging (or sustaining) factors is of vital importance in Africa’s lingering confrontations. Broader approaches (e.g. “structural stability”) offer a better analytical framework than familiar one-dimensional explanations. Moreover, for explaining and dealing with violent conflicts a shift of attention from the nation-state towards the local and sub-regional level is needed.Aktuelle Analysen afrikanischer Gewaltkonflikte sind häufig voller Fehlinterpretationen (Mangel an Differenzierung, Genauigkeit und konzeptioneller Klarheit, Staatszentriertheit, fehlende mittelfristige Zielvorstellungen). Breitere Ansätze (z. B. das Modell der Strukturellen Stabilität) könnten die Grundlage für bessere Analyseraster und Politiken sein als eindimensionale Erklärungen. häufig differenzieren Erklärungsansätze nicht mit ausreichender Klarheit zwischen Ursachen, verschärfenden und auslösenden Faktoren. Insbesondere die richtige Einordnung konfliktverlängernder Faktoren ist in den jahrzehntelangen gewaltsamen Auseinandersetzungen in Afrika von zentraler Bedeutung. Das Diskussionspapier stellt die große Variationsbreite dominanter Erklärungsmuster der wichtigsten internationalen Geber und Akteure gegenüber und fordert einen Perspektivenwechsel zum Einbezug der lokalen und der subregionalen Ebene für die Erklärung und Bearbeitung gewaltsamer Konflikte

Reluctant powers : a concept-building approach and an application to the case of Germany

Reluctance is an extremely widespread phenomenon in international politics. For example, several rising powers have displayed an inconsistent, flip-flopping approach towards their regions and have not conformed to the expectations and wishes of their potential regional followers. While the notion of reluctance is frequently employed to describe this type of incoherent and unresponsive foreign policy, the concept of reluctance has not been systematically defined and discussed in the fields of International Relations (IR) and Foreign Policy Analysis. This paper develops a conceptualization of reluctance by identifying the concept’s semantic field and discussing how reluctance relates to similar but distinct notions in the field of IR (concept reconstruction) and, on that basis, by outlining the constitutive dimensions of reluctance and their operationalization (concept building). To illustrate how this conceptualization of reluctance can provide new insights in empirical analyses, the concept is applied to the case of Germany’s approach to crisis management in Europe and the European neighborhood