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On January 9, 2014, Kate Almquist Knopf, Former USAID Assistant Administrator for Africa and then-adjunct professor (now director) at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations on the volatile situation in South Sudan, assessing the current crisis and offering several recommendations both for short- and long-term gains.
Kate Almquist-Knopf, then-adjunct professor (now Director) of the Africa Center, provides an overview of South Sudan’s struggle to establish a government that enjoys popular legitimacy and is accountable to its citizens.
In the process of recovering from a ruinous civil conflict, Africa’s youngest country faces the threat of renewed conflict, localized ethnic-based insurgencies, a deepening humanitarian crisis, and weak governance structures. Underlying all of these challenges are a weak national identity and fragile state-society relations. Trust and confidence in the government can be generated through a concerted effort to build inclusive coalitions of state and nonstate actors, expand independent media, and construct a rules-based, accountable foundation for the new state.
To mitigate vulnerabilities from foreign control over the supply of critical technological infrastructure, African countries should prioritize cybersecurity, diversity, and competition within the tech sector.
Unregulated logging of the Congo Basin rainforests threatens to undercut the livelihoods of millions of households in the region, empower transnational organized criminal networks, and dramatically accelerate global warming.
Eighty percent of the record 163 million Africans facing acute food insecurity are in conflict-affected countries, including potentially 840,000 people confronting famine in Sudan, South Sudan, and Mali.
Overcoming the ongoing asymmetry of Africa-China relations will require institutionalizing more robust and transparent African monitoring of commitments, strategic representation, and harnessing of African expertise.
The number of African refugees, internally displaced persons, and asylum seekers grew by 14 percent over the past year—to more than 45 million people.
Many Congolese dread the withdrawal of UN peacekeepers, believing government forces are unable to provide security in the eastern DRC.
The use of United Nations–assessed contributions to support African Union–led peace operations has the potential to revitalize peace operations in Africa.
Missile and armed drone strikes by Houthi militias and hijackings by Somali pirates have destabilized maritime shipping from the Red Sea to the Western Indian Ocean, impacting security and trade for all of Africa.
Disinformation campaigns seeking to manipulate African information systems have surged nearly fourfold since 2022, triggering destabilizing and antidemocratic consequences.