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This article examines the Task Forces created by the African Union (AU) to address the security threats posed by Boko Haram and the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA). It argues that these Task Forces are well suited to address transnational armed groups whose ambiguous political goals and extreme violence make traditional conflict resolution ineffective. Although the Task Forces fall within the AU's collective security mandate and broadly within the African Peace and Security Architecture (APSA), their distinct characteristics make it more capable of addressing these new cross-border threats. Their reliance on nationally funded and directed militaries also allow the Task Forces to fulfil both the goals of the AU and the interests of the regimes that take leadership roles within these structures.

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In Cold War Liberation: The Soviet Union and the Collapse of the Portuguese Empire in Africa, 1961Africa, -1975, Natalia Telepneva has produced an insightful and detailed addition to the history of the Cold War in Africa. Relying on newly available archival sources from Eastern Europe and Russia, along with a plethora of personal memoirs and interviews, Telepneva weaves together a complex narrative of Soviet support for the three wars of independence in Portuguese Africa. Her analysis is focused on the activities of the Soviet elites, showing how the personalities and worldviews of mid-level Soviet political and security personnel were often more important than broader geopolitical concerns in the calculus determining Soviet Union support for African liberation struggles.Chapters One and Two set the stage for readers. Chapter One offers a fast-paced overview of Soviet policy in Africa under Nikita Khrushchev and introduces the "mediators of liberation" (12), which include several officials from various Czech and Soviet intelligence and security agencies. Because Portuguese Africa was not strategically important enough to warrant the direct attention of Soviet leadership, Telepneva argues that most decisions about whether to support these revolutionary groups were made by these mid-level elites. Chapter Two provides a parallel story for Lusophone Africa, beginning with a brief description of the Portuguese empire in Africa and then turning to a presentation of the life stories of Amilcar Cabral, Marcelino dos Santos, Mário Pinto de Andrade, and Agostinho Neto-key African nationalists who were active in the early 1960s.In Chapters Three through Seven, Telepneva gives a chronological account of Soviet-African relations between the years 1961 and 1975, beginning with the uprising in Angola in 1961 and ending with the outbreak of the Angolan civil war. These chapters trace how the African elites built alliances with both international and African actors to gain support for their independence movements. They reveal how these international relationships evolved in the context of dynamic internal group politics and inter-group rivalries