West Africa Archive

Editor’s Note: Every Friday, Andrew Green curates the top news and analysis from and about the African continent. A coup attempt in Ethiopia’s Amhara region last weekend left dozens of people dead and prompted a security crackdown as Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed attempts to maintain his reformist agenda in the face of this latest, and deadliest, challenge to his administration. On Saturday, forces aligned with Brig. Gen. Asaminew Tsige launched simultaneous attacks on the region’s police headquarters, president’s office and ruling party center in the regional capital, Bahir Dar, killing the governor, his adviser and the attorney general, according to […]

Thousands of people gathered in Liberia’s capital, Monrovia, earlier this month to protest against a faltering economy and widespread corruption in the government. They blame President George Weah, a former football star who took office last year amid heightened expectations. Since then, corruption has continued to run rampant and economic conditions have only worsened. In an email interview with WPR, Elizabeth Donnelly, deputy head of the Africa Program at Chatham House in London, discusses the recent demonstrations and whether there is anything Weah can do to regain his “man of the people” image. World Politics Review: How significant was the […]

Editor’s Note: Every Friday, Andrew Green curates the top news and analysis from and about the African continent. The death of Mohammed Morsi, Egypt’s first democratically elected president, in a Cairo courtroom Monday has put another spotlight on the repressive regime that replaced him in a 2013 military coup. Under President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, the Egyptian government has imprisoned thousands of dissidents and members of Morsi’s now-banned Muslim Brotherhood, while also cracking down on freedom of expression and tightening its control over the media. True to form, Sisi’s government even restricted how journalists could report on Morsi’s death this week. […]

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. For now, […]

Editor’s Note: Every Friday, Andrew Green curates the top news and analysis from and about the African continent. With the massacre of at least 35 civilians this week in a small village in central Mali, including 24 children, the country’s ongoing cycle of ethnic violence appears to be escalating. A militant Islamist uprising that began in 2012 exacerbated existing tensions between the region’s pastoralist Dogon communities and the semi-nomadic Fulani herders, in the form of tit-for-tat killings between the two ethnic groups. The scale and intensity of those attacks are increasingly on the rise. Dogon militants appeared to massacre Fulani […]

Editor’s Note: Every Friday, Andrew Green curates the top news and analysis from and about the African continent. On Tuesday, the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, Sudanese security forces staged their own brutal crackdown on demonstrators in the capital, Khartoum. More than 100 protesters are estimated to have been killed and many of their bodies dumped in the Nile, while paramilitary forces injured and raped hundreds more, according to a Sudanese doctor’s organization. The violence apparently began with an early-morning raid by the paramilitary Rapid Security Forces on a protest camp that has been stationed outside the military’s […]