Böcker av Tatah Mentan

Human beings indeed need not justify terrorism of any kind, regardless of whether one is Muslim, Christian or Jew, because it is the axis of evil and devastation of mankind. Terrorism on Africa has been a ubiquitous presence against which the democratic values of African civilization are ranged-a demon to be exorcised at all costs, even at the cost of civil liberties. However, the deliberate use of the term terrorism in recent decades was carefully selected, mainly, against a certain religion (Islam). The idea was then globally politicized by the Western world. Leaving that scholarly view in its own right, this study disagrees with the opinion raising terrorism as the devil's just-born child of evil, when in reality Africans had been terrorized for centuries as slaves and human chattel, colonies, neo-colonies and captives of globalism. Terrorism on Africa has been the global threat against which global war must now be fought. It should have never taken place anyway! Whether the terrorizing country was peaceful or violent, no country should be granted the right to seize and restrict the development of a region. Europeans have crippled the rich native African civilizations for their own political and economic gain for centuries. No matter the reason, no intelligence, knowledge, or technology permits one country or countries to terrorize another or other countries like the terrorized and victimized in Africa. Africans must disable and counter propaganda and information operations. We must address known causal factors by strengthening vulnerable populations and improving their ability to identify, characterize, attribute, and defend against terror networks and threats. Our counter-terrorism architectures and capabilities will need to be more agile and more integrated. Mankind needs a common strategy. Understanding this complex terrorist environment will require mature global networks and effective links with interagency teammates and partner nations-allowing rapid synchronization of information across agency, regional, national, and international boundaries in order to dismantle the sustained multi-faceted terrorism on Africa.

This book examines the weak state-terrorism nexus with particular emphasis on Africa. Specifically, it provides an in-depth analysis of state weakness, poverty, and the opportunities offered by the latter for the breeding of terrorism and terrorists. It also looks at the part played by radical Islam in transnational terrorism in Africa.

Saving succeeding generations from the scourge of war was the main motivation for creating the United Nations. Given the ongoing conflicts, wars and terrorist attacks today one is forced to ask: Is there Hope for International Peace and Security? Where have the safeguards gone to? Has the United Nations become powerless in the face of absence of the "safeguards"? In this book, Professor Tatah Mentan examines the transformation in UN peace and security operations, analysing its changing role and structure. Tatah Mentan argues that the enemy of peace and security in the global system is the dictatorship of predatory bailed out monopoly capitalism that tells us that building war ships is more important than building alternate energy infrastructure. The real enemies are therefore the publicly bailed-out monopolies, Big Media, Big Pharma, Big Oil, the Military Industrial Complex, etc. that deny the truth about conflicts and insecurity. As he emphasises, the enemies are those who refuse to think critically, not being intellectually curious, and accepting the supremacist, fascist, and misgovernance that is reducing the world collectively to being cogs in a diabolical machine of neoliberal global capitalism.

Genocide has been called the 'crime of crimes' and an 'odious scourge.' With millions of victims in the last century alone, it is one of the great moral and political challenges of our age. Despite the challenges, such human cruelty has not stopped. The 21st century is recording its first genocide in Cameroon with only a scanty few raising a finger. The significance of the 'odious scourge' has compelled Tatah Mentan to research on the trajectory of the 'scourge' in Africa over the past centuries. The targeted ongoing mass killings in Cameroon, like those of Rwanda before, have driven the scholar to expand his focus beyond the Holocaust, which had long been the primary case study.In this book, Tatah Mentan explains that these cases were not merely a human catastrophe, nor an atavistic reversion to the barbarism of a past epoch, but rather an event produced by the unfolding of the logic of capitalism itself. This book therefore critically explores the essence of capitalism as genocide in Africa and its consequences on Africans during their colonisation and incorporation into the European-dominated racialised capitalist world system in the late 18th century. It uses multidimensional, comparative methods, and critical approaches to explain the dynamic interplay among social structures, human agency, and terror to explain the connection between structural capitalist terrorism and the emergence of the capitalist world system. Tatah Mentan proposes a genuine participatory democratic alternative to the unending genocide nightmares. Nurturing participatory attitudes, would facilitate and reinforce self-management, and educate and empower individuals and dispossessed and under-represented communities to seek self-determination and democratic participation in the political arena. Tatah Mentan concludes that the same fundamental commitments that urge humanity to promote participatory political democracy should compel them to promote truly inclusive economic democracy as well.Political economists, historians, students, corporate managers and policy makers at national and international levels are invited to share the insights of this book.

Contemporary social science is a product of the capitalist world-system and Eurocentrism is constitutive of the geoculture of this system characterized by the parochiality of its universalism, assumptions about the superiority of Western civilization and imposition as the sole theory of global progress. The creation of these structures of knowledge, specifically the institutionalization of the social sciences, is a phenomenon that is inextricably linked to the very formation and maturation of Europe's capitalist world system or imperialism. There is therefore nothing that is natural, logical, or accidental about the institutionalization of the social sciences. These Europeanized structures of knowledge are imposed ways of producing knowledge of the world. This Eurocentrism of social science has justifiably come under increasingly vigorous scrutiny, especially in the period since 1945 with the formal decolonization of Africa, Asia, and much of the Caribbean. This book forcefully argues that if social science is to make any progress in the twenty-first century, it must overcome its Eurocentric heritage that has distorted social analyses and its capacity to deal with the problems of the contemporary world and embrace other non-Western funds of knowledge production.

Africa's dynamic security environment is characterized by great diversity-from conventional challenges such as insurgencies, resource and identity conflicts, and post-conflict stabilization to growing threats from piracy, narcotics trafficking, violent extremism, and organized crime taking root in urban slums, among others. This precarious environment jeopardizes security at the societal, community and individual levels. In a globalized and interconnected world, millions of people worldwide are affected by some form of human insecurity. Infectious and parasitic diseases annually kill millions. Internally displaced persons number millions, including 5 million in Sudan alone. In Zambia 1 million people in a population of 11 million are reported to be HIV-positive, a situation much worse in other countries. Potable water crisis looms almost everywhere. In this book Tatah Mentan points out the need to shift the focus away from a state-centric and military-strategic emphasis on security to an interdisciplinary and people-centric approach that embraces notions like global citizenship, empowerment and participation. The primary elements of economic, food, health, environment, personal, community and political security all comprise the broader understanding of human security in an intricately interconnected world.

This book critically analyzes the complex relationship between the African state and capitalist globalization. It describes in great detail the significant effects of the various historical trajectories of global capitalist expansion on the nature and functions of the African state while focusing on the present triumph of globalized neo-liberalism on the African continent. The history of the state in Africa has been misread and misinterpreted through the Eurocentric convictions of European African scholars alike. The State in Africa has, since its colonial inception, has served as the best possible political shell for capitalism, enabling it to penetrate, again possession and establish itself firmly and securely, regardless of institutional and leadership instability at the helm. The glaring artificiality of the state in Africa, coupled with the failure of the local ruling classes to rise above the limitations of their provenance, is to blame for the myriad crises of one-party authoritarianism, violent coups and military dictatorship. It is also to blame for the progressive alienation of the African people, and the prevailing crises of identity and citizenship. Independence does not seem to have changed much, as the state is still controlled by the most powerful foreign, economically dominant class, which, has appropriated political power as well to further compound the subjection and exploitation of the oppressed Africans. Today the continent continues to grapple with underdevelopment, civil wars, intra-state conflicts, political instability, state failure and outright collapse, thus calling into question the viability and survivability of the Westphalian state model in Africa.

The celebrations that heralded democratic change in the 1990s in Africa have gradually faded into muffled cries of anger and attendant violence of despair. Almost everywhere on the continent so-called democratic leaders are openly subverting the people's will and disregarding national constitutions. Ordinary people find themselves removed from the centres of power, marginalized and reduced to helpless and hopeless onlookers as political leaders, their friends and families noisily enjoy the spoils of impunity. From Nigeria to Zimbabwe, Kenya to the Ivory Coast and Uganda to Cameroon, the writing is on the wall. The experiment with democracy has blatantly taken a dangerous nosedive. There is a crisis of honest, committed and democratic leadership, in spite of the advancements in education and intellectualism of the populace, and despite the influences of globalization and new understandings of governance. In this brief volume, Tatah Mentan makes an incisive diagnosis of how the "security forces" brutally crush protests against bids to stay in power through corrupt electoral practices as well as how opposition voices have been hunted down and crushed or intimidated into graveyard silence. This is a clarion call for Africans to embrace the values of People Power in synch with the dictates of the current global imperatives. There is no place for visionless leadership. Africans need to raise their voices to recapture their freedom.

The need for a revision of this well received and reviewed work was obvious to all serious observers of sub Saharan Africa: The emergence in the last decade of the enormouspolitical, economic and social clout of China, the desire of Magrebi states and Egypt to continue a "southward" policy that includes conversion to Islam, Arab investment and especially control of oil and agricultural lands. Professor Mentan has lucidly discussed the origins of neo colonialism and in this new work not only challenges the "benign" intent of China and Libya, he also introduces 3 new chapters on NGO-land...the Haiti-like conversion of whole regions into dependence on non governmental organizations based in the West(but also ,increasingly,in the East). Mentan also discusses African higher education and its thralldom (in too many cases) to European or American models that are unworkable in the HIPC nations of West and Central Africa. This "academic capitalism " is shown as extremely harmful to the poorest African societies especially Fundamentalist Islam and Christianity. The author does not spare national and local elites and homegrown political and social players in what has happened but he argues that that the forces of neocolonialism(although they would decry that label) still seek to atomize,exploit an dominate via concentrated ownership and development of Africa's immense natural resources and potential consumer demand.Finally, this study also discusses the realities of genocide, permanent war, disease and forced urbanization as they effect the African people discussing Darfur, Southern Sudan,Eastern Congo,Rwanda and Cote Ivoire.