West Africa Archive

War is back in fashion. Across northern and western Africa and in the Middle East, governments are resorting to force to counter regional threats. Last week, Saudi Arabia launched airstrikes against the Houthi rebels in Yemen, with the backing of nine other members of the Arab League. Members of this coalition are already involved in the air campaign in Iraq and Syria against the so-called Islamic State (IS). Some are also itching to get sucked into the Libyan conflict. In Nigeria, meanwhile, an ad hoc coalition of local armies and foreign mercenaries has taken the offensive against Boko Haram. All […]

Last year, during a midnight search for contraband in South Africa’s St. Albans maximum security prison, more than 200 inmates were forced to lie naked on the ground in a human chain, each one’s face pressed into his neighbors’ buttocks. They were then subjected to beatings, electric shocks and torture. The abuse was not an isolated case. According to a complaint lodged by former inmate Bradley McCallum with the United Nations Human Rights Committee (UNHRC), a similar incident occurred at St. Albans in 2005 after the stabbing of a prison warden. In his complaint, McCallum alleged that inmates were forced […]

On April 15, exactly 18 days before the end of President Faure Essozimna Gnassingbe’s second term in office, Togo will go to the polls to elect its next head of state. In power since the death of his father, Gen. Eyadema Gnassingbe, in 2005, Gnassingbe will be running for a third term as president. Though permitted by the 2002 constitution passed by his father, which removed presidential term limits, his candidacy is nevertheless contested by the opposition, concerned by what it calls the “confiscation of power” by a man whose family has ruled the country for over 40 years. During […]

In the modern security environment, insurgency is the strategy of choice for violent extremists. Even so, the United States insists on clinging to an outdated concept of insurgency steeped more in the anti-colonial struggles of the Cold War than the fluid battlefields where movements like the self-declared Islamic State (IS), Boko Haram and the al-Qaida affiliates in the Arabian Peninsula and North Africa lurk. During the Cold War, the most dangerous insurgencies blended a leftist ideology with nationalism. This combination gave revolutionary insurgency its reach, appealing to more supporters and recruits than either leftism or nationalism alone could have done. […]