African Security

An Introduction

John Siko, Jonah Victor

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781788317429
• eBook ISBN: 9781786726377
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: National Security
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The world's fastest growing continent demographically, Africa displays nearly all the features of today's global security challenges: armed conflict, terrorism, irregular migration, organized crime, great power competition, public discontent, and economic turbulence. John Siko and Jonah Victor present their lessons from professional practice and pedagogical approach from the classroom in a concise guidebook that leads students and professionals through the most important issues, dynamics, challenges, and considerations for analysing and planning responses to security developments in Africa.
This book provides issue-by-issue primers on the causes and consequences of Africa's security challenges that include: -how to anticipate security problems across current political and economic events
-how to analyse African security institutions and military capabilities
-how to understand historical trends across the African continent and appreciate unique variations among countries.
-how to identify key drivers of future trends
-how to connect security analysis to policy planning Learning is supported through the following features: - Thematic chapters which are optimized to help the reader quickly connect to the key concepts
and analytic frameworks within the field.
- The most relevant historical case studies, enabling students to engage in sophisticated analysis
and discussion.
- Connections and contrasts between the situations in North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa, which are traditionally studied separately.
- Special sections on understanding race and ethnicity, and advice on traveling in Africa.
- Chapter-end checklists of key questions to enable practical engagement with the topics covered.

1

Your guide to African security

Chapter Outline

Our perspective

Our approach

We have written this book because you need to have a basic understanding of African security.

So who are you? You might be a student (undergraduate or graduate) taking a course on Africa for the first time and not having much familiarity with the region. Maybe you are a journalist, diplomat or civil servant who has switched bureaus and needs to get smart in a hurry. In a similar vein, you may be serving in the military and deploying to a UN peacekeeping operation or to US Africa Command in Stuttgart. You could be an investor exploring opportunities in the world’s last true frontier market who needs to be aware of the security challenges that accompany the immense opportunities, or an NGO specialist planning programmes for Africa. And who knows, you might just be an avid reader who thought the title looked interesting and wanted to get up to speed on a region that is getting increasing media attention.

Whoever you are and whatever your background, we think this short book will be a useful companion in helping you to understand the various security challenges that have plagued the continent for decades, as well as the social and political dynamics that will shape it for years to come. It is important that you are familiar with them; Africa is no longer on the fringes of global consciousness. Widespread and rapidly expanding mobile telephony and social media connect Africans to the rest of the world like never before. Economically, it has been one of the world’s fastest growing regions this century. Granted, this is from a low base, and the continent remains by far the world’s poorest region. However, demand for the continent’s raw materials has made it far more integrated into the global economic order. Its governments, with the assistance of international donors, have made notable progress toward fighting disease and poverty. In 2019, the number of Africans escaping extreme poverty was beginning to exceed those falling or born into it. Additionally, a number of long-tenured corrupt and repressive leaders were replaced in the late 2010s, opening potential windows for political reform in the 2020s including in Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Ethiopia and South Africa.

That said, the picture is not universally positive, and challenges lie ahead. From Libya in the north, to the DRC in the centre, Somalia in the east and Mali in the west, Africa remains beset by seemingly intractable conflicts that may abate for periods but not be resolved. Longer lives and lower infant mortality rates are contributing to rapid population growth, particularly in the continent’s least-developed countries. This is creating a youth bulge that governments will struggle to deal with for the foreseeable future; there simply are not enough jobs for young people to fill. This in turn contributes to perpetuating conflict cycles – a growing abundance of unemployed young people under ill-prepared governments is a perpetual threat to stability. Increasing attempts by Africans to migrate abroad in search of a better life is gaining growing attention, particularly in Europe. The spread of violent extremism on the continent is another danger.

These are all issues that you need to know about. Migration, and how African and Western governments respond to it, is going to be a fundamental political issue across the world for decades to come. Unless one understands the drivers of mass migration, it is impossible to make effective policy decisions around it. The UN and many member governments have made multibillion-dollar commitments to peacekeeping in Africa since the mid-1990s, with mixed success. Without responding to the roots of conflicts, often involving tough political choices, these interventions can be of limited utility. Western militaries in the past decade have become hyper-aware of the security threat posed by Islamic extremist movements in North, West and East Africa; again, one must know what drives these movements in order to address the challenges they pose. China’s political and economic role is on track to grow in the 2020s, and more and more external powers from Europe, Asia, the Middle East and the Americas are seeking opportunities in Africa and competing for influence, including with established Western partners like France, the United States and the United Kingdom. The bottom line is that understanding Africa is no longer an elective in the realm of international affairs scholarship or a ‘nice to have, but not necessary’ in the policy-making world.

Our goal with this book has been to make these issues a bit less difficult to understand and properly situate Africa in the global security landscape. The continent is not a place one can afford to ignore any longer.

Our perspective

So why us, and why now, to write this book? Each of the authors has undertaken advanced academic study of African affairs; we have worked in analytic, diplomatic and policy planning functions across the US government under four presidents in the Intelligence Community, Defense Department and White House; and we have developed and taught graduate and undergraduate courses on Africa security issues at prominent schools of international affairs. We have travelled extensively and lived on the continent; collaborated with innovative and intrepid Africa-focused academic researchers; worked with government officials dedicated to advancing and understanding peace, prosperity, and US–African relations; and taught students eager to learn about African affairs. Still, we encountered basic knowledge of Africa critically lacking in a number of situations. One of the authors gives a map quiz on the first day of teaching an Africa-related course; only one out of hundreds of students has ever successfully identified every African country, and even 50 per cent is a mark rarely seen!

In our work among governmental Africa specialists, we observed that military officers and civil servants who were transferred into posts with Africa responsibilities lacked a book that would help them get up to speed quickly. In our dialogue with academic colleagues, we realized that some of them had an incomplete sense of how practitioners learned from their research. When developing our courses on Africa, we found it quite difficult to prescribe reading material that covered all of the basics while introducing students to the history and concepts they needed to know. This is not to say there are not excellent books and articles on African security; we will be citing and introducing many essential sources throughout this book that readers with specific interests should check out. However, most of the best literature tended to be a bit more theoretical or country-specific than what we were looking for – either too broad or too deep for covering in a single semester the range of issues that we think must inform any study of the continent’s security situation.

At the same time, we worked within a larger international affairs community – governmental and academic – where we frequently got the sense and message that African issues were not to be taken as seriously as other national security and foreign policy matters, including affairs in the Middle East, Europe–Eurasia and Asia. It is true that issues in Africa may pose less of a ‘threat’ to global security than those in, say, nuclear-armed regions and do not generate as many headlines. However, non-specialists often approach Af rican affairs with the explicit or implicit belief that they require less money, fewer people, less expertise and less preparation. This belief includes ideas that African politics are less complex than elsewhere and should be easy to engage and manage by outsiders; that Africa is a venue for charitable and humanitarian endeavours and not serious business and diplomacy; and maybe even that Africans do not matter much in the global scheme of things.

Even when attention and interest exists, there can be significant misunderstanding leading to missteps and unintended consequences. A lifetime of observing and advising Western governmental and non-governmental Africa engagement led the late eminent Africanist Stephen Ellis to conclude that ‘foreign cheerleading for progress in Africa often amounts to little more than the projection of personal ideologies onto a space on the map sufficiently little-known as to accommodate fantasies of every type’.¹

This book proposes a different perspective. We believe, first, that Africa, its security problems, and its geopolitics deserve to be studied, understood and engaged with as much seriousness and rigour as any other world region. Africa is a rapidly changing and growing continent that is of increasing importance to global politics. It is not fossilized in history books. Current developments need to be monitored and interpreted, and we have to be willing to update our perspective on Africa’s potential, its challenges, its relations with the world, and the ever-increasing variation of conditions across the continent.

Second, we believe that security problems in Africa need to be considered using a broad analytic framework that is centred on the agency, perspectives and decisions of Africans. Furthermore, it must take into account the continent's social, political and economic diversity, dynamics and transformations. While much of Africa’s social, political and economic circumstance was shaped by major world powers and other foreigners, Africans are at the centre of what is happening today and the developments we will see in coming years. African leaders are actively making strategic decisions in foreign policy and national security, and African citizens also make consequential decisions such as who to vote for in an election, how to respond to economic adversity, and how to engage in politics: through the system, in the streets or through militant insurrections. Africans do not engage other Africans or the wider world as a tabula rasa. Memories of previous interactions are important, and so we discuss the historical roots of the current situation that informs their perspective, highlighting insights from the latest social science, historical and policy research that will help you interpret current dynamics.

Third, we recognize that Africa’s security challenges have proven stubbornly difficult to address and in some cases are worsening, with increasing consequences for global security. However, Africa is not exotic; it is not mysterious or impenetrable. Its security challenges are complex, but as we will explore here their basic roots – poverty, limited economic opportunities, state weakness, competing interest groups, power-hungry leaders and so on – are not greatly different than what drives conflict and insecurity elsewhere in the world. We will look at where Africa converges with global security trends and highlight what makes it particular.^* We also try to move beyond the portrayal of Africa and Africans as victims of forces and global structures beyond their control. Africans certainly live under some pretty significant constraints, not faced by Americans or Europeans. But if we focus only on constraints, we will have trouble anticipating future political, economic and security developments.

To sum up, our goal with this book was to create something that can help general and specialist readers alike get smart in a hurry on African security issues that matter to real-world problem solvers. While we may present some novel approaches and perspectives, we would emphasize that the goal of this book is not to break any new theoretical ground. In essence, what you will read here is a distillation of our lecture notes, our academic study and research, and our lessons learned as practitioners about the most useful frameworks for understanding African affairs and responding to Africa’s security problems.

What makes our voice a bit different is that we did not pen this text as full-time academics, or on a writing sabbatical or research fellowship. We were working on the issues covered here in practice and applying these insights every day to help governments and clients respond to both urgent and long-term developments on the continent. We interject with our own observations and anecdotes to illustrate critical points. While intended as an academic and professional text, we want it to be accessible to general readers as well. We certainly hope that you will find it to be so. These are our independent views and do not represent those of any organization for which we have current or former affiliation.

Our approach

The approach we take in this book is to offer opportunities for the reader to quickly connect to the key concepts, analytic frameworks, and insights from both the scholarly literature and the authors’ own experience in the government and corporate sector. The ultimate goal is to help readers better comprehend the continent’s emerging security issues and help them brainstorm solutions and responses. For some issues, a robust body of empirical scholarship and data exists that informs our thinking. For others, our understanding is necessarily more speculative, based on anecdotal or journalistic accounts, and our own analysis and experience. In either case, we try to familiarize the reader with the most relevant historical cases that will enable them to engage in sophisticated analysis and discussion of the issues.

At this point it is probably most useful to walk you through what we intend to cover in the following twelve chapters. To understand contemporary (and future) African security challenges, one must have a basic understanding of the conflicts and security issues that have marked Africa’s precolonial, colonial and post-independence history. Chapter 2, therefore, provides an overview of the pre-independence period, ranging from precolonial conflicts through the liberation struggles of Southern Africa. Many of these historical dynamics still have an impact on contemporary conflicts and hence deserve attention.

In C hapter 3, we move into the modern era and provide the reader with an overview of the key drivers of contemporary conflict and a review of the major conflicts of the twentieth and twenty-first century, some of which remain unresolved. We examine several major conflicts, both civil and interstate, that shaped contemporary Africa, all of which hold valuable lessons about the prospects for violent conflict in Africa today.

Chapter 4 focuses on the geopolitical situation of North Africa, its linkages across the Sahara, and its place in the larger African context. Traditionally, North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa have been addressed separately by scholars and professional specialist alike, as the North African countries have looked more toward the rest of the Arab world in the Middle East for cultural influences and political relationships. In recent years, however, North Africa has increased its engagement with the rest of the continent, part...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• About the authors
• Disclaimers
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Your guide to African security
• 2 Insecurity before independence
• 3 War and peace in independent Africa
• 4 Connecting North Africa to the subcontinent
• Interlude A: Is it racial, ethnic, tribal or clannish?
• 5 Understanding Africa’s armed forces
• 6 Understanding Africa’s religions, religious extremists and violence
• 7 Understanding crime and law enforcement in Africa
• Interlude B: Is Africa safe to visit?
• 8 Anticipating and responding to military coups and mutinies
• 9 Anticipating and mitigating election violence
• 10 Anticipating and preparing for economic crisis in Africa
• 11 Managing and ending African conflict
• 12 Tracking external actors, influence and competition in Africa
• 13 Future trends in African security and policy options
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright