Africa Archive

Environmental crime, despite being a more than $200 billion black market industry, has long been viewed as a tree hugger issue. However, an increasing body of evidence suggests that protecting our oceans, forests and wildlife is not only a matter of conservation, but one of global development and even national security. As a result, governments are finally taking more decisive action. Consider the issue of illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing. Since the 1960s, fish consumption has risen from an annual average of 22 pounds per person to nearly double that today. With the world’s middle class projected to reach […]

“Di war don don,” declared Sierra Leonean President Ahmad Kabbah, in Krio, at a ceremony in the capital, Freetown, in 2002: “The war is over.” The small coastal West African country of Sierra Leone had emerged limping and gasping for air from a decade of one of the bloodiest civil wars in Africa, a conflict that had spilled out across the entire region from Guinea to the north and west to Liberia and Cote d’Ivoire to the east. It was a war over power and the toppling of a corrupt regime, but it became infamous for its “blood diamonds” and […]

Earlier this month South Africa announced plans to relocate 200 rhinoceroses after anti-poaching efforts in Kruger National Park proved ineffective. In an email interview, Natasha White, a research assistant at the Graduate Institute’s Centre on Conflict, Development and Peacebuilding in Geneva, discussed poaching trends in Africa. WPR: What new tactics are governments adopting to curb poaching, and what is driving their adoption? Natasha White: Over the past few years, there has been a shift in the scale and nature of poaching. Governments are increasingly acknowledging the severity of its impacts, which stretch far beyond the devastating drop in elephant and […]

Is nation-building—a concept that most Western policymakers disowned after Iraq and Afghanistan—about to make a comeback? Two weeks ago, I predicted that 2015 could see the deployment of large-scale international stabilization forces in four trouble spots: Libya, northeastern Nigeria, Syria and Ukraine. The prospects for operations in at least two of these cases, Libya and Nigeria, have risen since then. Libya’s factions are engaged in on-and-off peace talks in Geneva, and United Nations officials have publicly discussed options for a military operation to support a political deal. Meanwhile, West African governments have been talking up a new regional operation to […]

The first weeks of 2015 have already brought repeated, shocking attacks by Boko Haram in and around Nigeria. Within the country’s northeastern state of Borno, the home turf of the proselytizing sect-turned-Islamist-group, militants massacred hundreds of civilians in Baga, site of a multinational military base. Suicide bombers attacked Maiduguri and Potiskum, the latter on three occasions. In a continuation of last year’s trends, Boko Haram’s violence spilled once again into northern Cameroon, where militants kidnapped dozens of children and adults in villages near Mokolo. Some commentators, including Kenan Malik in the New York Times, argue that “jihadists have turned terror […]

In November 2014, Turkey announced plans to send peacekeepers to participate in U.N.-backed missions in the Central African Republic and Mali. In an email interview, Nil S. Satana, assistant professor at Bilkent University in Ankara and research affiliate at the START Center at the University of Maryland, College Park, discussed Turkey’s contributions to international peacekeeping missions. WPR: In what capacity has Turkey contributed to European Union peacekeeping missions, and how does Turkey decide whether or not to participate in a given mission? Nil S. Satana: In compliance with its framework agreement for participation in EU crisis management operations signed in […]

Recent violence has touched all corners of the small Central African nation of Burundi. Earlier this month, attacks by an unnamed and as yet unclaimed rebel group, composed of both Hutus and Tutsis, left over 100 people dead in the western province of Cibitoke. They were followed by the killing of three members of the ruling party, the National Council for the Defense of Democracy-Forces for the Defense of Democracy (CNDD-FDD), in Ruyigi, near the border with Tanzania. The timing of the attacks is suspicious, with elections, the third since the ending of major hostilities of the civil war in […]

Where will international stabilization forces intervene in 2015? Potential answers include Libya, Syria, Nigeria’s northern borderlands and eastern Ukraine. Restoring order in any one of these places, let alone two or more at once, would be a daunting task. Libya is sinking into full-scale civil war. Syria has been ravaged by four years of violence, leaving over 200,000 dead. The Boko Haram militant group has inflicted repeated defeats on the Nigerian military in a conflict punctuated by massacres by both sides. Russia retains the ability to turn the war in Ukraine on and off at leisure. Few countries outside these […]

Uganda and North Korea agreed to strengthen bilateral ties during a visit from Kim Yong Nam, chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Peoples’ Assembly of North Korea, in late October last year. In an email interview, Andrea Berger, a research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, discussed North Korea’s ties with Uganda. WPR: How extensive are North Korea’s ties with Uganda, and how has the relationship changed since Kim Jong Un came to power? Andrea Berger: North Korea and Uganda have had positive bilateral relations since the mid-Cold War. At the time, the North Korean foreign policy apparatus […]

Editor’s Note: This is the second of a two-part briefing on Tunisia’s elections. Part I looked at the state of democratic transition with the rise of the Nedaa Tunis party. Part II focuses on economic issues and whether Tunisia’s progress is sustainable. Despite Tunisia’s success navigating its political transition by holding peaceful, fair elections, the challenges of keeping it sustainable remain enormous. If Tunisia’s newly elected leaders don’t deal with those challenges carefully, they could undermine the steady progress Tunisia has made over the past four years. The most alarming issue is the absence of a clear economic agenda in […]

PARIS—For the seven years I have lived here, the French military has been at war, first in Afghanistan, then in Libya, Mali and the wider Sahel region. Yet if the French armed forces were not only engaged, but at times stretched to the breaking point by their operational pace, the French people seemed oblivious to the country’s role in the fight against Islamic extremism in Africa and now the Middle East. In all but the most dramatic circumstances, casualties were ignored, and while the spotlight of breaking news at times put these wars in the public’s mind, the debate was […]

Editor’s Note: This is the first of a two-part briefing on Tunisia’s elections. Part I looks at the state of democratic transition with the rise of the Nedaa Tunis party. Part II will focus on economic issues and whether Tunisia’s progress is sustainable. Tunisians are making history again. The birthplace of the Arab Spring seems to be setting itself up to be the home of Arab democracy, pluralism and peaceful transition—and a model for the entire Arab world. Last month, for the first time since its independence from France in 1956, Tunisia successfully held competitive parliamentary and presidential elections—praised by […]

Gambia yesterday accused the former head of the presidential guard of leading a small coup attempt that two U.S. citizens were also involved in. In an email interview, Jeffrey Smith, an advocacy officer at the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights, discussed Gambian politics and the recent attempted coup. WPR: What is the nature of President Yahya Jammeh’s regime, and how strong is his support among the general public and military? Jeffrey Smith: Yahya Jammeh is a retrograde dictator, one of the last remaining strongmen in power on the African continent. For West Africa, a region that […]

In a reversal of historical trends, emerging countries are now going to great lengths to buy into portions of Europe’s sluggish industrial system. In the gloomy context of an old continent struggling to overcome the crisis that has been gripping its economies since 2007, businesses from developing nations are queuing to purchase valuable European assets, often in countries that were once their colonial rulers. As a consequence of the growing importance that their own countries have gained on the world stage, private and public managers from China, India and the Persian Gulf countries are now familiar figures in the governing […]

The open feuding within Zimbabwe’s ruling party, ZANU-PF, intensified last month, as rivals battled over the succession to 90-year-old President Robert Mugabe. This culminated in the dismissal by Mugabe of Vice President Joice Mujuru and her allies in the Cabinet, a move that handed Justice Minister Emmerson Mnangagwa the advantage in the succession race. Mnangagwa benefited from the support of the president’s wife, Grace Mugabe. With Mujuru apparently neutralized, the question is whether that alliance will hold, or whether it will be undermined by rival ambitions. The purge of December 2014 still leaves a whole host of issues unresolved in […]