Interest Groups and the Shaping of Foreign Policy: Four Case Studies of United States African Policy

A Nigerian scholar scrutinizes U.S. policy-making on the Congo, Biafra, Rhodesian sanctions and the South African sugar quota. More often than not his "interest groups" reside within rather than outside the U.S. government, making his account more a history (ending in 1973) of the policy process within Congress and the Executive than of how various pressure groups affected this process. Except on Biafra (where his analysis seems skewed by a strong sympathy for the secessionists), his blow-by-blow descriptions of who-and-how present interesting and valuable details about U.S. African policy from the mid-1960s through the early 1970s.