Books by Tatah Mentan

Saving succeeding generations from the scourge of war was the main motivation for creating the United Nations. Given the ongoing conflicts, wars and terrorist attacks today one is forced to ask: Is there Hope for International Peace and Security? Where have the safeguards gone to? Has the United Nations become powerless in the face of absence of the "safeguards"? In this book, Professor Tatah Mentan examines the transformation in UN peace and security operations, analysing its changing role and structure. Tatah Mentan argues that the enemy of peace and security in the global system is the dictatorship of predatory bailed out monopoly capitalism that tells us that building war ships is more important than building alternate energy infrastructure. The real enemies are therefore the publicly bailed-out monopolies, Big Media, Big Pharma, Big Oil, the Military Industrial Complex, etc. that deny the truth about conflicts and insecurity. As he emphasises, the enemies are those who refuse to think critically, not being intellectually curious, and accepting the supremacist, fascist, and misgovernance that is reducing the world collectively to being cogs in a diabolical machine of neoliberal global capitalism.

Genocide has been called the 'crime of crimes' and an 'odious scourge.' With millions of victims in the last century alone, it is one of the great moral and political challenges of our age. Despite the challenges, such human cruelty has not stopped. The 21st century is recording its first genocide in Cameroon with only a scanty few raising a finger. The significance of the 'odious scourge' has compelled Tatah Mentan to research on the trajectory of the 'scourge' in Africa over the past centuries. The targeted ongoing mass killings in Cameroon, like those of Rwanda before, have driven the scholar to expand his focus beyond the Holocaust, which had long been the primary case study.In this book, Tatah Mentan explains that these cases were not merely a human catastrophe, nor an atavistic reversion to the barbarism of a past epoch, but rather an event produced by the unfolding of the logic of capitalism itself. This book therefore critically explores the essence of capitalism as genocide in Africa and its consequences on Africans during their colonisation and incorporation into the European-dominated racialised capitalist world system in the late 18th century. It uses multidimensional, comparative methods, and critical approaches to explain the dynamic interplay among social structures, human agency, and terror to explain the connection between structural capitalist terrorism and the emergence of the capitalist world system. Tatah Mentan proposes a genuine participatory democratic alternative to the unending genocide nightmares. Nurturing participatory attitudes, would facilitate and reinforce self-management, and educate and empower individuals and dispossessed and under-represented communities to seek self-determination and democratic participation in the political arena. Tatah Mentan concludes that the same fundamental commitments that urge humanity to promote participatory political democracy should compel them to promote truly inclusive economic democracy as well.Political economists, historians, students, corporate managers and policy makers at national and international levels are invited to share the insights of this book.

Contemporary social science is a product of the capitalist world-system and Eurocentrism is constitutive of the geoculture of this system characterized by the parochiality of its universalism, assumptions about the superiority of Western civilization and imposition as the sole theory of global progress. The creation of these structures of knowledge, specifically the institutionalization of the social sciences, is a phenomenon that is inextricably linked to the very formation and maturation of Europe's capitalist world system or imperialism. There is therefore nothing that is natural, logical, or accidental about the institutionalization of the social sciences. These Europeanized structures of knowledge are imposed ways of producing knowledge of the world. This Eurocentrism of social science has justifiably come under increasingly vigorous scrutiny, especially in the period since 1945 with the formal decolonization of Africa, Asia, and much of the Caribbean. This book forcefully argues that if social science is to make any progress in the twenty-first century, it must overcome its Eurocentric heritage that has distorted social analyses and its capacity to deal with the problems of the contemporary world and embrace other non-Western funds of knowledge production.

Africa's dynamic security environment is characterized by great diversity-from conventional challenges such as insurgencies, resource and identity conflicts, and post-conflict stabilization to growing threats from piracy, narcotics trafficking, violent extremism, and organized crime taking root in urban slums, among others. This precarious environment jeopardizes security at the societal, community and individual levels. In a globalized and interconnected world, millions of people worldwide are affected by some form of human insecurity. Infectious and parasitic diseases annually kill millions. Internally displaced persons number millions, including 5 million in Sudan alone. In Zambia 1 million people in a population of 11 million are reported to be HIV-positive, a situation much worse in other countries. Potable water crisis looms almost everywhere. In this book Tatah Mentan points out the need to shift the focus away from a state-centric and military-strategic emphasis on security to an interdisciplinary and people-centric approach that embraces notions like global citizenship, empowerment and participation. The primary elements of economic, food, health, environment, personal, community and political security all comprise the broader understanding of human security in an intricately interconnected world.

The celebrations that heralded democratic change in the 1990s in Africa have gradually faded into muffled cries of anger and attendant violence of despair. Almost everywhere on the continent so-called democratic leaders are openly subverting the people's will and disregarding national constitutions. Ordinary people find themselves removed from the centres of power, marginalized and reduced to helpless and hopeless onlookers as political leaders, their friends and families noisily enjoy the spoils of impunity. From Nigeria to Zimbabwe, Kenya to the Ivory Coast and Uganda to Cameroon, the writing is on the wall. The experiment with democracy has blatantly taken a dangerous nosedive. There is a crisis of honest, committed and democratic leadership, in spite of the advancements in education and intellectualism of the populace, and despite the influences of globalization and new understandings of governance. In this brief volume, Tatah Mentan makes an incisive diagnosis of how the "security forces" brutally crush protests against bids to stay in power through corrupt electoral practices as well as how opposition voices have been hunted down and crushed or intimidated into graveyard silence. This is a clarion call for Africans to embrace the values of People Power in synch with the dictates of the current global imperatives. There is no place for visionless leadership. Africans need to raise their voices to recapture their freedom.