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The Africa Center for Strategic Studies convened a seminar with South Sudan conflict mitigation experts to discuss the prospects of the recently signed ceasefire agreement and the priorities for establishing stability in the world’s youngest state.
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.
Rivalries among Tigrayan political leaders threaten to derail the process of reintegrating Tigray into Ethiopia’s federal structure and could rapidly escalate into a wider conflict involving Eritrea and regional actors.
A sharp restriction in off-continental irregular migration combined with escalating push factors will continue to shape governance and security priorities in Africa and underscore the need for more regional innovation to accommodate intracontinental population movements.
Africa’s persisting conflicts are compounding crises of governance on the continent, straining already fragile regions and opening the door to foreign exploitation through proxy forces, resource trafficking, and information manipulation.
Extensive flooding in more than two dozen African countries due to higher-than-average rainfall has resulted in thousands of fatalities, millions of people displaced, and devastated infrastructure.
China is leveraging its military training exercises with African forces to advance China’s expeditionary capabilities and geostrategic ambitions.
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 disrupt water cycles in West Africa and the Nile River Basin.
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.