Oil, minerals and the militarisation of globalisation

A new study has linked conflicts in Africa with the continent’s oil and mineral resources that Western powers are fighting to control through the militarised foreign policy of the United States in Africa, and geopolitical wars.

The study, Globalisation in Africa: Commercial Wars and State Failure in Uganda is a University of Malaya PhD thesis by Ugandan scholar Yunus Lubega Butanaziba.

Released in October 2009, it says the West’s “imperial” interest in Africa’s wealth first led to conquest and more recently the creation of a centralised military force, the US African Command (Africom) to police these resources, including Uganda’s oil.

This interest has shaped global geopolitics from pre-World War II through the Cold War to the present in Congo, Darfur, Somalia, Sudan, Angola, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Uganda.

No wonder these countries are among the world’s conflict flashpoints of the post-Cold War era.

The study also postulates that commercial and resource wars are a US agenda with its allied Western powers — all members of the Bretton Woods institutions since 1944 that seeks to weaken internal political systems and take control of resources.

This casts a very grim picture on the fortunes of Uganda that struck oil only a few years ago but has since been on the brink of slipping back into conflict.

When Uganda discovered oil in 2006, the two-decade long war in the north was on the ebb, but since then, there have been flashes of violence — last year’s Banyoro-Bakiga tribal clashes and the clash between Congo and Uganda armies — which could point to eruption of conflict, this time in the oil fields of western Uganda.

However, it is the creation of the Djibouti-based Africom, based on theories of American political scientist Samuel Huntington that explain why more resource wars are set to unfold in oil and mineral rich countries.

Huntington had taken the global strategy theory to another level in his “Next pattern of conflict” essay that Butanaziba says guided Washington’s model of globalised security, which others have called the militarisation of globalisation.

This model saw the creation of four strategic military commands to keep close watch on resources.

Other commands are Eucom (Europe), Centcom (Africa/Asia), Pacom (Pacific) and Southcom (South America).

This stage had been arrived at following years of implementing the global strategy to control world resources that the US political strategists Halford Mackinder and Nicholas Spykman had laid ground for earlier.

It would guide imperial interests in Africa through the colonial, Cold War and post-Cold War periods.

Mackinder argued that whoever rules East Europe commands the Heartland, and eventually, the world and its resources.