Coming up with a different set of political and economic practices, the changes the end of Cold War has brought to international system and the study of International Relations seems intolera-ble to deny at this moment in time. For sub-Saharan African peoples that have been dominated externally through the historical processes of imperialism, colonialism and neo-colonialism and internally by unaccountable elites, the end of the cold war has come up with a new set of oppor-tunities and challenges. On the one hand, the world has experienced a democratic revival; dis-mantling of authoritarian regimes and replacing them with democratic ones. On the other hand, the end of the Cold War has removed the ideological, economic, and political and security hur-dles to the consolidation of the global capitalist order. Therefore, it is important to note here that, today the sub-continent is in the interplay of opportunities and challenges.

The end of the Cold War in the early 1990s led some scholars in the Third World to believe and optimize that new opportunities had emerged to advance agendas of social justice, national libe-ration and democratization locally and in the global system. Moreover, with the collapse of the Soviet bloc the Third World would no longer be a staging ground for East–West rivalries (Ro-binson, 2004; 47). The end of the cold war witnessed an end to the east-west rivalry that charac-terized the cold war period and ‘neo-liberalism’ 1 became the dominant modes of thought and action within the global political economy. Moreover, Merera writes that “liberal democracy and the attendant free enterprise have become the ideological hamburger both for the legitimating of the state by the regime in power and the social movements fighting to redefine the state” (Mere-ra, 2007; 2)..