This book focuses on security problems facing the twenty-first-century African state. Through multiple essays, the authors explore both current and past security issues associated with tribal warfare and jihadist terrorism within a rapidly changing global context where state sovereignty and institutional capability is in decline. Historic and modern situations have coalesced to create unique security challenges for many African states.
A comprehensive analysis of how Islamic radicalism, tribal conflicts, and globalization merge to complicate African security is frequently missing from the literature. These three forces conjoin in some African countries to create vexing security challenges. Amy Chua’s excellent book, World on Fire, explores some of these issues albeit in a very general way.1 However, given the lack of a systematic exploration of these issues, the authors of this volume hope to make such a contribution. We also aspire to illuminate how tribal animosity, civil war, and reconciliation are being handled in select African countries. We shall accomplish these goals using a state-centric focus.
Despite the novelty of the book’s exploration of recent challenges, we will take a more traditional route and concentrate on the central role of the state and its vital connection to security. The critical role of the state in the provision of security is amply recognized in social science literature.2 Maintaining order—social, political, and economic—is frequently predicated upon the state achieving a monopoly over the instrument of coercion. Without security, fully developed economic and social structures are problematic at best and their full potential is drastically constrained. States unable to maintain security often suffer lawlessness, civil war, alienation, poverty, famine, pandemics, and societal collapse. Distressingly, this is the case in many African countries. Table 1 shows where various African states fall on The Fund for Peace’s Fragile States Index, which is a comprehensive measure of a society’s level of instability. The index is based on a range of comprehensive economic, social, legal, and political conditions that provide a general snapshot of a dysfunctional continent full of failing states.
Africa is a continent awash in failed states that are unable to maintain political stability and security. The 2014 Fragile States Index, for example, contains a preponderance of African and especially sub-Saharan states. Government failure is so widespread that it conjures an image of a dysfunctional continent. Indeed, African states include 14 of the top 20 failing regimes. Some of the most extreme examples can be found in sub-Saharan Africa.
Somalia illustrates the worst aspects of state failure in the region and of the combined impact of globalization, Islamic radicalism, and tribal-religious animosities. The overthrow of General Siad Barre’s dictatorial regime more than three decades ago resulted in state collapse and internecine fighting between rival warlords. The breakdown in security disrupted agricultural production, resulting in widespread famine and hundreds of thousand deaths. The United Nations (UN) intervened in 1992 to assist international agencies in their famine relief operations. International forces accompanying the UN relief effort eventually expanded into security operations against warlords who were interfering with the delivery of food supplies, further exacerbating the security situation as those warlords then turned their guns on UN forces.
A comprehensive analysis of how Islamic radicalism, tribal conflicts, and globalization merge to complicate African security is frequently missing from the literature. These three forces conjoin in some African countries to create vexing security challenges. Amy Chua’s excellent book, World on Fire, explores some of these issues albeit in a very general way.1 However, given the lack of a systematic exploration of these issues, the authors of this volume hope to make such a contribution. We also aspire to illuminate how tribal animosity, civil war, and reconciliation are being handled in select African countries. We shall accomplish these goals using a state-centric focus.
Despite the novelty of the book’s exploration of recent challenges, we will take a more traditional route and concentrate on the central role of the state and its vital connection to security. The critical role of the state in the provision of security is amply recognized in social science literature.2 Maintaining order—social, political, and economic—is frequently predicated upon the state achieving a monopoly over the instrument of coercion. Without security, fully developed economic and social structures are problematic at best and their full potential is drastically constrained. States unable to maintain security often suffer lawlessness, civil war, alienation, poverty, famine, pandemics, and societal collapse. Distressingly, this is the case in many African countries. Table 1 shows where various African states fall on The Fund for Peace’s Fragile States Index, which is a comprehensive measure of a society’s level of instability. The index is based on a range of comprehensive economic, social, legal, and political conditions that provide a general snapshot of a dysfunctional continent full of failing states.
Africa is a continent awash in failed states that are unable to maintain political stability and security. The 2014 Fragile States Index, for example, contains a preponderance of African and especially sub-Saharan states. Government failure is so widespread that it conjures an image of a dysfunctional continent. Indeed, African states include 14 of the top 20 failing regimes. Some of the most extreme examples can be found in sub-Saharan Africa.
Somalia illustrates the worst aspects of state failure in the region and of the combined impact of globalization, Islamic radicalism, and tribal-religious animosities. The overthrow of General Siad Barre’s dictatorial regime more than three decades ago resulted in state collapse and internecine fighting between rival warlords. The breakdown in security disrupted agricultural production, resulting in widespread famine and hundreds of thousand deaths. The United Nations (UN) intervened in 1992 to assist international agencies in their famine relief operations. International forces accompanying the UN relief effort eventually expanded into security operations against warlords who were interfering with the delivery of food supplies, further exacerbating the security situation as those warlords then turned their guns on UN forces.
