Peacekeeping Crucial for African Stability
Despite their shortcomings, African peace operations have saved lives, built security sector capacity, and helped mitigate conflict—reducing pressure on international actors to become directly involved.
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Despite their shortcomings, African peace operations have saved lives, built security sector capacity, and helped mitigate conflict—reducing pressure on international actors to become directly involved.
As senior French representative, Lieutenant Colonel Jean-Baptiste Matton serves as a liaison between the Africa Center and the French Ministry of Defense, coordinating exchanges on security-related Africa policy and scholarship. He also serves as a facilitator and speaker at Africa Center academic programs.
Africa’s humanitarian crises have continued to worsen in 2017. Twenty million Africans have been displaced from their homes and 44 million are acutely food insecure.
Program materials for the Africa Center's 2017 National Counterterrorism Strategies in Africa program. Click here for syllabus, bios, readings, and slides.
A review of violent events involving militant Islamist groups in Africa over the past year reveals a mixed picture, with some groups showing increased activity and others diminished. This variance underscores the importance of local factors affecting each context.
Program materials for the 2017 Managing Security Resources in Africa 2.0 program. Click here for syllabus, readings, and presentation slides.
Program materials for the 2017 Africa's Contemporary Security Challenges program. Click here for readings, slides, and video of presentations.
Conflicts of interest within Africa's fisheries sector enable unsustainable exploitation by foreign fishing firms and undercut the political will needed to build more robust surveillance and prosecutorial capacity.
Libya has been carved into multiple tribal fiefdoms whose economies depend on internal and external flows of income, licit and illicit. The political rise of the previously marginalized Toubou by leveraging their control of the smuggling economy, for example, reveals the many ways local conflict dynamics influence and are influenced by external forces including organized crime. It also exposes the resulting disincentive the various parties have to rebuild a unified nation. Identifying and addressing the many layers of internal and external involvement in Libya’s fractionalization will help transition the “patchwork state” to a central state.
The distinction between legitimate and illicit business in Africa is fluid due to the significant size of informal trade on the continent. At the same time, globalization has allowed organized criminal groups to link up with international networks, including violent extremists.
“To be an effective leader, you must want to empower those following you,” says General Martin Luther Agwai in an interview with the Africa Center for Strategic Studies.
“Climate change causing conflict” arguments are not supported by the evidence. There is no evidence, for example, that pastoralist versus farmer conflicts in Africa are due to climate change. There is, however, much evidence that these conflicts are the result of government interference in local distribution of resources, access to land, and even the disappearance of state presence.