Title: The Abongo abroad : military-sponsored travel in Ghana, the United States, and the world, 1959-1992 /
Authors: Clune, John V., 1973-
Year: 2017
Subjects: Military education Ghana.; Military education United States; Educational exchanges Ghana.; Educational exchanges United States.; Military assistance, American Ghana.; Armed Forces; Educational exchanges; Military assistance, American.; Military education; Military relations.; Ghana Armed Forces United States.; Ghana Military relations United States.; United States Military relations Ghana.; Ghana; United States
Abstract: "Blending African social history with US foreign relations, John V. Clune documents how ordinary people experienced a major aspect of Cold War diplomacy. The book describes how military-sponsored international travel, especially military training abroad and United Nations peacekeeping deployments in the Sinai and Lebanon, altered Ghanaian service members and their families during the three decades after independence in 1957. Military assistance to Ghana included sponsoring training and education in the United States, and American policymakers imagined that national modernization would result from the personal relationships Ghanaian service members and their families would forge. As an act of faith, American military assistance policy with Ghana remained remarkably consistent despite little evidence that military education and training in the United States produced any measurable results. Merging newly discovered documents from Ghana's armed forces and declassified sources on American military assistance to Africa, this work argues that military-sponsored travel made individual Ghanaians' outlooks on the world more international, just as military assistance planners hoped they would, but the Ghanaian state struggled to turn that new identity into political or economic progress."--Back cover.
Contents: Modernization ideology and the United States Military Assistance Program -- Independent and international: Ghana's national military and American assistance policy -- Writing for peace: international men and women of the Ghana Armed Forces -- "I think they would be better off if we took them on a tour of Disney World": continuity and change in international military education and training.