Australia has contributed to African peacekeeping missions for decades, but that record has rarely translated into sustained policy knowledge or engagement.

Australia’s African peacekeeping record is easy to overstate and just as easy to ignore. It does not amount to a grand tradition of continental engagement. Most deployments were small, specialist and relatively short-term. From Congo in 1960 to South Sudan today, Australians have served in enough African peace and security theatres to complicate the familiar claim that Africa sits outside Australia’s strategic experience. Parliamentary records note that by 2011, Australia had contributed Australian Defence Force (ADF) and Australian Federal Police (AFP) personnel to 14 separate peacekeeping operations in Africa since 1960, excluding Middle East and Persian Gulf operations.

But this history of Australia in Africa has not developed into a broader understanding – an Africa literacy. There is little institutional memory and minimal evidence that these peacekeeping encounters have shaped how Canberra understands African politics, institutions or security priorities.

Australian personnel served with the United Nations Operation in the Congo in 1960–61, then in the Commonwealth Monitoring Force in Zimbabwe and the Commonwealth Military Training Team in Uganda. Australia joined the UN Transition Assistance Group in Namibia and later the United Nations Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (MINURSO). These were not large deployments, but they placed Australians inside some of the foremost African and international questions of the late 20th century: decolonisation, state formation, ceasefire monitoring and post-conflict transition.

The 1990s made the connection harder to dismiss. Somalia, Rwanda and Mozambique were defining tests of post-Cold War internationalism. In Somalia,........

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