Africa

The U.S. government should not repeat the mistake made by the Nigerian government of designating the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) as a terrorist group.

In October, an American scholar argued in a Washington Times op-ed that the United States should designate the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), a secessionist group in Nigeria’s South East region, as a terrorist group. To the casual onlooker, this could seem logical: IPOB has long been proscribed as a terrorist group by Nigeria’s government, and it reportedly boasts a 50,000-strong army. But doing so would be a mistake that risks causing a massive human rights crisis in Nigeria and West Africa.

Crisis in Guinea-Bissau, coup in Burkina Faso reflect how ‘stabilization’ policies fall short.

The government of Guinea-Bissau says it survived an attempted coup d’état yesterday, just days after Burkina Faso suffered the fifth coup in nine months around the greater Sahel. These upheavals cement this African region as the most pronounced center of a global crisis: Poor and authoritarian governance is breeding extremism and transnational criminality, igniting violence and undermining efforts to build democracies. Following last year’s military power grabs in Chad, Mali, Guinea and Sudan, the new crises highlight widening risks to security — for the 135 million people of the Sahel region, and ultimately for Europe and the United States. They also point to changes needed in U.S. and international policies.

The contagion of coups d’etat in the Sahel and West Africa shows no signs of slowing, with an attempted coup in perennially fragile Guinea-Bissau the latest installment in what could be a long saga. These alarming developments have rightly sparked soul-searching among supporters of democracy and questions about whether external actors—sometimes myopically focused on security assistance in the face of terrorist threats—have done enough to disincentivize soldiers from seizing control of the state. They call into question the role of the African Union and the United Nations in effectively protecting the principles they espouse.

In the latest in a series of military coups in West Africa, a group of army officers in Burkina Faso has overthrown the government of President Roch Kabore. In a televised address on Burkina Faso’s state broadcaster on Monday, the group—which has dubbed itself “the Patriotic Movement for Safeguard and Restoration,” or MPSR—said that it had deposed Kabore, suspended the constitution, closed the country’s borders and dissolved the government and the legislature. The group affirmed that Kabore remains safe and in good condition.

When historians look back and try to explain how France lost its historical position as the dominant outside actor in West Africa, the oft-repeated line that Ernest Hemingway used to describe how one of his fictional characters went bankrupt will undoubtedly come to mind: gradually, then suddenly.

Since 2017, the Djugu territory of Ituri province in northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has been convulsed by conflict. In November 2021, rising community tensions resulted in four attacks of unprecedented violence in Tché, Drodro, Paroisse, Luko, and Ivo.

Months of tension and protests in Burkina Faso culminated in a military takeover on January 24. This political crisis comes as conflict continues in the country, causing violence and displacement and leaving many people struggling to find food, water, shelter, and medical care. Humanitarian organizations have also been hit by the violence, making it extremely challenging to provide much-needed aid.

Every expert on transnational jihadism knew that eradicating the Islamic State’s self-declared “caliphate” in Syria and Iraq would not lead to the end of this brutal, malignant movement. Since it had become as much an ideology and a brand as an actual organization, holding physical territory and establishing a proto-state were important but not vital for the Islamic State, at least in the near term. In response to its battlefield defeats in Iraq and Syria, the Islamic State has been dispersing, keeping its brand alive with hopes that someday it can take another shot at creating a state.

Abstract: With the explosive growth of banditry in northwestern Nigeria in recent years, there has been growing speculation among Nigerian and international observers that these criminal insurgents are receiving support from or otherwise converging with jihadis based in the country’s northeast. However, a lack of open-source data on the inner workings of both banditry and Nigeria’s jihadi insurgencies have precluded detailed analysis of this potential “crime-terror nexus.” Drawing on the authors’ extensive fieldwork across Nigeria’s northern conflict zones in 2021 and early 2022, including exclusive interviews with both bandits and jihadi defectors, this article provides the first in-depth examination of the links between Nigeria’s bandits and jihadi organizations. While there are many reasons to expect that Nigeria’s bandits and jihadis would cooperate and that jihadis would recruit bandits to their cause, the authors show how this has not been the case. The authors argue that Nigeria’s bandits are too fractious and too powerful for jihadis to easily coopt them and that the bandits’ lack of ambitious political objectives—and the significant differences in the modus operandi of bandits and jihadis—means that jihadism holds little intrinsic appeal for them. However, jihadi groups have taken advantage of instability in the northwest enabled by the bandits to establish small enclaves in the region that they are likely to sustain as long as they can maintain a modus vivendi with local bandit gangs.