Africa's creditors stress ‘capacity building’ measures to strengthen bureaucratic effectiveness to reverse economic and political decline (Dia 1993). World Bank officials point to the East Asian example of success in using government policies and institutions to promote ‘market friendly’ growth policies insulated from the pressures of clients demanding payouts as a positive example for Africa (World Bank 1993a). Analysts recognise, however, that decades of patron-client politics and intractable rent-seeking behaviour (the use of state resources for personal gain) among state officials limit short-term prospects for increasing revenue collection. With little internal financing for market-boosting policies, World Bank programmes prescribe extensive civil service layoffs. Subsequent reductions in unproductive expenditures will reduce corruption, balance national budgets and remove obstacles to private market growth. Economic growth will in turn produce a class of entrepreneurs to demand more policies and slimmed-down bureaucracies to enhance economic efficiency. This ‘growth coalition’ will identify their interests with those of cost-effective technocratic administrators (World Bank 1994a:10–13).

Meanwhile, reform programmes stress the role of foreign investment in generating reliable, politically insulated revenues, especially where domestic public and private investment is limited. A recent World Bank report recommends privatisation and commercialisation of customary state activities where scarce revenues and political entanglements make technocratic reform unlikely (World Bank 1994b:22–51). It argues the advantages of private contractors taking direct responsibility for state services, especially in public works and utilities that are crucial to attracting more foreign investors and supporting local entrepreneurs.

By the late 1970s a new type of rebel struggled against despotism and repression – reform rebels. Their targets were indigenous African rulers such as Uganda's Idi Amin (1971–79) and Ethiopia's Mengistu Haile-Mariam (1975–91). Leaders of these new rebels promised to fight against repressive African governments to bring about a “second liberation” to implement new ideas of governance in areas that they controlled. They adapted the anti-colonial rhetoric of national emancipation and a new societal order. Like anti-colonial and majority rule rebels, reform rebels accepted existing borders. Even Eritreans who fought to create a separate country argued that Eritrea's status as a former Italian colony (1896–1941) and its 1950 UN-sponsored federation with Ethiopia entitled it to separate statehood, and that Eritrea's independence was just the last stage of decolonization.

These rebels faced a difficult environment in which their appearances seemed to be at odds with the idea in this book that rebel behavior and organization reflect the broader political context in which they fight. Yoweri Museveni's National Resistance Movement (NRM), the Eritrean People's Liberation Front (EPLF) and Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF) in Ethiopia, and the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) lacked the international support that their anti-colonial and majority rule counterparts enjoyed. Those rebels could reasonably count on support from the OAU Liberation Committee and the UN Decolonization Committee, provided that they could convince outsiders of their capacity to fight alien rule.

Violent encounters between states and rebels and the international community's assumptions about how Africa's states should be governed underscore the last half-century of warfare on the African continent. The founding compact of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) in 1963 that forbade countries from conquering their neighbors' territories had a very real impact in nearly eliminating conventional wars between African states. Much of this had to do with the mutual recognition of vulnerabilities. But the wider global decision that international borders would be sacrosanct no matter how illogical or inconvenient they may appear has turned attempts at conquest such as Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's bid in 1990 to annex Kuwait into futile projects that generate almost total condemnation by other states and in this case reversal by a military invasion. This compact has largely held in Africa, as it has in much of the rest of the world. The Tanzanian invasion of Uganda in 1978–79 forced from power Uganda's President Idi Amin after he had violated this compact with his occupation of a chunk of Tanzanian territory. Ethiopia's and Eritrea's war, which broke out in May 1998, was about the exact location of an international border, not its revision. The Ethiopian army's 2006–09 intervention in Somalia came at the invitation of the weak, UN-backed transitional government. Morocco's war to annex Western Sahara on Spain's withdrawal from its colony in 1976 really was an irredentist exception, although some argued that Morocco made no claim against the territory of an existing sovereign state.

The rebels who fought white-dominated regimes for majority rule in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), South West Africa (Namibia), and South Africa tried to present themselves as deserving international recognition. From the 1960s through the early 1990s international politics greatly influenced how these rebels presented their goals and strategies to their followers and the rest of the world. As in the case of the anti-colonial rebels, external supporters pressed rival rebel groups to show evidence of popular support in a particular country and to unify into a single organization, although often there was disagreement among these backers as to which rebel group was to be preferred. Rebel leaders knew that they had to convey an image of unity, through either agreement or superior performance on the battlefield, if they were to attract the money and diplomatic backing required to fight their wars. The link between socialist ideology and the organization of rebels and their strategies was evident too. Many majority rule rebels also sought rear bases and solidified their personal and operational ties to their anti-colonial brethren as those rebels came to power in the wake of the Portuguese withdrawal in 1974.

The regional politics of majority rule left its imprint on rebel organizations. Internal politics of the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) and the Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU) reflected the necessity for these movements to align their ideas with those of Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere and Zambian President Kenneth Kaunda to secure their backing.