Whilst much of the world has been formally decolonised, the ways we think about international relations often remains Eurocentric. This is evident in the critical debate on the liberal peace, which problematises the politics of postwar intervention. In this debate, it is argued that donors conduct invasive liberal social transformations in the name of conflict management and good governance. Although insightful, these critiques have tended to ignore the target society as a subject of history and politics in its own right. In response, the thesis turns to anti-colonial thought for strategies to reconstruct the target society as a subject of politics and source of critique. Drawing on the thinking of Césaire, Fanon and Cabral, these approaches offer philosophical re-orientations for how we understand the embodied subject, how we approach analysis, and how we think about political ethics. I use these insights to look at the liberal peace in Mozambique, one of intervention’s ‘success stories’. First, ‘Mozambique’ is itself re-constituted as a subject of history, in which the liberal peace is contextualised within historical forms of rule. Second, political subjecthood is reconstructed through thinking about ‘double consciousness’ on issues of governance and corruption. Third, I look at forms of conscious transactionality and alienation in the material realities of the liberal peace. Finally, I explore the historically ambivalent relationship of the peasantry with the state, which highlights alternative responses to neoliberal policy. The conclusions of the thesis suggest that the problem with the liberal peace is not so much that it is an alien form of rule which is culturally unsuitable but an alienating form of rule which is politically and economically exclusionary. The kind of critical ethical response that this demands is not based on the assumption of unbridgeable ‘difference’ between the West and its Others, but of the potential and actual connections between embodied political subjects who can listen to and hear each other.

This thesis addresses three questions: What are proxy wars? How are proxy wars waged? Why are proxy wars waged? Each research question addresses a gap, a flaw or a deficiency in the current knowledge of proxy wars. Accordingly, each question is matched with a research aim. The first aim is to establish a conceptual and definitional baseline for proxy wars as a point of inquiry. The second seeks to restrict the empirical domain of proxy wars in an effort to enhance our ability to recognise proxy wars in the contemporary security environment. Lastly, the third objective is an analysis of the normative and causal dynamics underpinning party interaction in proxy wars. Taken together, the three research questions form the focus of my research, namely to understand and explain proxy wars as a self-standing form of political violence. I apply my research questions to Africa on a timeline beginning with 1945 leading up to 2011. I build a qualitative dataset, the Proxy War Dataset, which maps the spread of the phenomena across time, space (regions, countries), and conflict indicators (incompatibility). I use it as a descriptive tool to understand proxy wars, as well as a theory-informing source of data. In answering the causality problem, I put forward a theory of distributional violence focused on strategic interaction which yields four distinct logics of distribution of violence in proxy wars: pre-emptive, managerial, retaliative, and cooperative. I probe the theory with a series of four case studies focused on proxy wars in Ethiopia, the country most affected by the phenomena under observation throughout the 1945-2011 timeline.

This thesis uses evidence from British and international archives to examine the events leading up to Rhodesia’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) on 11 November 1965 from the perspectives of Britain, the Old Commonwealth (Canada, Australia, and New Zealand), and the United States. Two underlying themes run throughout the thesis. First, it argues that although the problem of Rhodesian independence was highly complex, a UDI was by no means inevitable. There were courses of action that were dismissed or remained under explored (especially in Britain, but also in the Old Commonwealth, and the United States), which could have been pursued further and may have prevented a UDI. Second, the thesis argues there were structural weaknesses in the machinery of government of each of the major actors, but particularly in Britain. This made the management of the Rhodesian Crisis more difficult, contributed to the likelihood of a UDI, and exacerbated tension in relations between Britain and its international partners. In stressing these themes the thesis builds upon some of the earlier literature that was critical of the Labour Government’s foreign and Commonwealth policies. Although this thesis is primarily an international history, it also makes use of theories from political science and international relations to frame certain aspects of the empirical research.