East Africa Archive

Last September, South Sudan’s president, Salva Kiir, signed a power-sharing deal with rebel leader Riek Machar, promising to bring an end to the five-year civil war that has crippled the world’s newest country, which declared its independence from Sudan in 2011. It wasn’t the first time. A similar agreement signed in 2015 broke down the following year, leading to fighting that prompted Machar to flee the country. Observers predicted the new agreement would share the fate of its predecessor. What was billed as a “revitalized” peace plan was still silent on many of the underlying drivers of violence and seemed […]

Editor’s Note: Every Friday, Andrew Green curates the top news and analysis from and about the African continent. Eight months after his contested election, the president of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Felix Tshisekedi, finally has a Cabinet. But the list of new ministers released Monday has done little to dissuade critics who allege that Tshisekedi only won the election last December thanks to the intervention of his predecessor, Joseph Kabila, who had held onto power for years, subverting the constitution. Of the 65 positions in the new Cabinet, 42 are drawn from Kabila’s coalition, including plum roles running the […]

Editor’s Note: Every Friday, Andrew Green curates the top news and analysis from and about the African continent. The separatist crisis in Cameroon deepened this week after a military tribunal handed down life sentences to the separatist movement’s leader and nine of his followers. As observers warned that the sentences would make it harder to bring the two-year conflict to an end, separatist militias launched reprisal attacks that killed at least two people and forced dozens more to flee their homes. The conflict has its roots in concerns within Cameroon’s minority English-speaking population that they have been historically marginalized by […]

Editor’s Note: Every Friday, Andrew Green curates the top news and analysis from and about the African continent. After a two-day truce to observe the Eid al-Adha holiday, fighting has resumed in Libya. Any hope that the brief pause might signal a path to the resolution of a conflict that erupted in April, when military strongman Khalifa Haftar began his campaign to conquer the capital, Tripoli, quickly evaporated. Since Haftar launched his assault on Tripoli, 1,100 people have been killed and more than 100,000 displaced. Even as the truce was announced, a car bomb exploded in the eastern city of […]

Editor’s Note: Every Friday, Andrew Green curates the top news and analysis from and about the African continent. With the signing of a peace agreement this week, Mozambique’s decades-long internal struggle might finally be nearing its end. The agreement between the country’s two rival political parties—Frelimo, which has controlled the government since independence in 1975, and the former guerilla movement Renamo—comes just two months before national elections. The anti-communist Renamo rebels launched a 15-year war against Frelimo’s Marxist government shortly after Mozambique achieved its independence from Portugal in 1975. The conflict was notoriously brutal and also spurred a famine, killing […]

A cast of foreign actors is seeking to shape Sudan’s incomplete political transition after the fall of longtime President Omar al-Bashir, each nudging it in the direction they favor. Their competing agendas are complicating negotiations between the ruling Transitional Military Council and civilians in the pro-democracy movement represented by the Forces for Freedom and Change. The two sides reached a major agreement on July 5 to jointly manage a three-year transition to civilian rule, and there was a recent breakthrough on Aug. 4, as they finalized that July deal and thrashed out its details. Yet the transition remains fragile and […]

This week, diplomats from 27 countries around the Asia-Pacific gathered in Bangkok for the ASEAN Regional Forum, where they discussed the many geopolitical flashpoints in the region, from North Korea to the South China Sea. Meanwhile, Venezuela is coming under mounting criticism in the wake of a recent United Nations report on its human rights abuses, and a cease-fire agreement in Mozambique ended a return to violence 27 years after the end of that country’s devastating civil war. WPR’s editor-in-chief, Judah Grunstein, and associate editors Elliot Waldman and Laura Weiss talk about all of this and more on the editors’ […]