Carving up Africa the right way

OP-ED: "Can Africa Trade Its Way to Peace," by Herman J. Cohen, New York Times, 16 December 2008.

Neat piece that speaks to the need to re-design Africa economically and thus connect to the global economy on a more logical and fair basis . This guy proposes dealing with violence there by making a common market happen across Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. With it, states there would feel the impulse to "finance and arm militias to wage war over the natural resources in Congo's eastern provinces."

This is an argument I make in Great Powers: pre-emptively redraw Africa's lines in an economic sense so that we're left with pie-wedge multinational economic unions that connect the middle to the coasts. I think you end up with at least five such unions--maybe seven.