Identity Politics in Africa and the Americas

In this issue, Joint Force Quarterly explores potential sources of fuel for regional and global insurgencies, energizing sources for which military remedies are few. In the May–June edition of Foreign Affairs, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates predicted that “the most lethal threats to [U.S.] safety and security are likely to emanate from states that cannot adequately govern themselves or secure their own territory.” However, many such countries in Africa and the Americas feature postcolonial ethnic barriers to upward mobility, deviations from which threaten castes in national leadership. If the future effectiveness and credibility of the United States will only be as good as the “effectiveness, credibility, and sustainability of its local partners,” what is the United States to do about allies whose domestic policies, power maintenance, and cultural priorities generate precisely the hopelessness and disaffection that transnational terror groups target for exploitation...