African History · Unit 11
State Collapse and Civil War
When the Cold War's superpower patrons left, and clan militias, child soldiers, and diamond wealth filled the vacuum
This unit examines what happened across parts of Africa once Cold War-era superpower patronage, examined in this curriculum's earlier unit, disappeared almost overnight in the early 1990s. It traces Somalia's total governmental collapse following Siad Barre's 1991 overthrow, Sierra Leone's eleven-year war fought substantially over control of diamond wealth, and Liberia's back-to-back civil wars under Charles Taylor, whose arms-for-diamonds relationship with Sierra Leone's rebels directly connected the two conflicts.
Learning Objectives
- •Students will be able to explain how the sudden withdrawal of Cold War-era superpower patronage, examined in this curriculum's earlier unit on the Ogaden War, contributed directly to Somalia's 1991 state collapse.
- •Students will analyze how control of a valuable natural resource, in this case diamonds, can transform and prolong a civil war, using Sierra Leone's Revolutionary United Front as a specific case study.
- •Students will trace the direct, documented connections between the Liberian and Sierra Leonean civil wars through the figure of Charles Taylor, evaluating how instability in one West African state destabilized its neighbors.
- •Students will evaluate the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme as an international policy response to conflict resource extraction, assessing both its documented achievements and its persistent, well-documented limitations.