An Evaluation of Africa’s Participatory Experience in United Nations Peace Keeping Operations, 1994-1998

Peacekeeping was pioneered and developed by the United Nations (UN) as one of the means for the maintenance of international peace and security. Governments have increasingly turned to the UN to deal with ethnic and national conflicts that have flared up in many regions of the world especially in the post-cold war era. All member states of the UN ought to share in the burden of maintaining international peace and security financially and in making security personnel available for such purposes. This therefore calls for burden sharing in carrying out this task. The paper analyses the roles played by African states in this burden sharing towards UN peacekeeping operations. It also identified the active participants from Africa and reasons were adduced for such regularity. The paper makes use of primary, secondary and tertiary sources to arrive at its conclusions. It is the conclusion of this paper that African states participate in UN peacekeeping operations and other aspects of burden sharing though at a lower scale. Some active participants from Africa are identified and they do so for the interest of the international community and most especially for their private interest. This explains why most of them participate mainly in African based conflicts due to its spill over quality and also due to their quest for regional or sub regional power status.