Permalink : http://hdl.handle.net/2115/47573

This article aims to apply risk concepts to the international politics. Though the preventive diplomacy has never been discussed in this discipline, the international society has dealt with it in conformity with UN peacekeeping operations, PKO. In 1992, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, General Secretary of United Nations at the time, reported "An Agenda for Peace". According to this agenda, the Peace Enforcement Unit can have a mandate to enforce its order, using some stronger weapons than PKO. The United States interpreted this "Agenda for Peace" to bring a multinational army to Somalia. But this mission ended in failure, because this multinational army looked down on African social groups (lineage, clan, ethnic and tribe) and their relationships with the state power. Risk concepts allow us to have a large point of view on preventive diplomacy and peace building after the conflicts. According to Niklas Luhmann, risk is an uncertainness and a contradiction that come from multiple social systems' communications. His theory guides us to have multiple approaches for settling and preventing ethnic conflicts in Africa. That is to say that we have to adopt intercultural education, security police, impartiality of ethnic groups, transparency of administration system, etc. to implement the preventive diplomacy. These are human safety elements that are larger concept than national military safety investigated by traditional way of international politics. But international society failed at prevention of the genocide in Rwanda. In this article, we can find multiple reasons of this failure, for example, discrimination between Tutsi and Hutus ethnic groups, propaganda and manipulation of media, bad process from one-party dictatorship to democratization, arms dealing and strategies among big powers in the context of globalization. After all, the international society was too much benumbed to avoid these risks. This article will be useful to increase the knowledge of ethnic conflicts in Africa to promote the preventive diplomacy. And we can prevent the prejudice against the stereo-typed image of "violent and barbarian Africans". Taking many elements of risks at a conflict in account, we can see that African people is involved in the structure of violence and animosity. In this article, I verify this structure and at the conclusion show that a simple-minded thought about the citizenship that is an opposition to ethnic groups cannot bring a settlement. African citizenship is a larger concept than general one involving peasants, lineage, clan, ethnic and tribe who practice traditional customs. Now, African countries, which confront with a new style of Nation State, try to integrate these African social actors to establish their own democratic state.