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Title:
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Gulliver's Troubles : Nigeria's Foreign Policy After The Cold War
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Authors:
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Adekeye Adebajo ;
Abdul Raufu Mustapha
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Material Type:
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printed text
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Publisher:
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Scottsville, South Africa : University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2008
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ISBN (or other code):
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978-1-86914-148-6
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Size:
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404
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Languages:
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English
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Class number:
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10.1.3 (International relations (Nigeria))
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Keywords:
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International relations
;
International relations (Africa)
;
International relations (Nigeria)
;
Foreign policy
;
Foreign relations
;
Politics and culture
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Abstract:
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This volume is a masterful contribution to the study of Nigerian foreign policy. It is dedicated to two distinguished Nigeria specialists, Anthony Kirk-Greene and Gavin Williams, and comprises seventeen chapters structured into five thematic parts. Eight of the contributors were former students of the dedicatees. As Adebayo Adedeji (the former executive secretary of the UN Economic Commission for Africa) accurately puts it in his foreword, this volume is a significant contribution to the development of a long overdue ‘foreign policy architecture capable of meeting the challenges posed by contemporary international realities’.
In Part One, Adekeye Adebajo sets out the ambitions and central argument of the book in a stimulating discussion that also explains the reference to Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) in the title. In Swift’s tale, Gulliver encounters a community of tiny and treacherous Lilliputians who humiliate and incapacitate him by staking him out with ropes as he lies spreadeagled and exhausted on the beach where he has been shipwrecked. Adebajo argues that ‘Nigeria, the most populous and one of the most powerful states in Africa is a Gulliver; and the Lilliputians have been Nigeria’s leaders whose petty ambitions and often inhumane greed – like the creatures in Swift’s tale – have prevented a country of enormous potential from fulfilling its leadership aspiration and development potential’ (p. 2). The ‘big men’ of post-colonial Nigerian politics come out of this account looking pretty small.
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