Africa

The authors write that much has changed for Mukhtar "Abu Mansur" Robow, a key founding member of the Somali jihadist organization al-Shabaab, over the past decade. In November 2008, al-Shabaab was sweeping across southern and central Somalia toward the capital city of Mogadishu. Robow led the jihadists not only in their fight against the Somali government and allied international forces but also in their enactment of territorial governance and implementation of a harsh form of Islamic law. Ten years later, in October 2018, Robow, who once condemned democracy as "unbelief," announced his candidacy for the presidency of Somalia’s South West State.

National self-determination, the principle that US President Woodrow Wilson put on the international agenda in 1918, is generally defined as the right of a people to form its own state. The independence referendums in Iraqi Kurdistan and Catalonia are the latest examples showing why that principle is so often difficult to apply.

"What explains the Islamic State's disappointing record in Africa? Perhaps its leaders underestimated the historical ties between many African jihadi organizations and al Qaeda. Almost certainly they underestimated many African jihadi leaders' desire for autonomy, a trait that sat uneasily with the Islamic State's vision of centralized control through a caliphate. But the Islamic State also failed to back up its rhetorical appeals for loyalty with material support."

"Local pro-IS figures are willing, it seems, to move away from the actual IS organization's general practices, in particular related to the violence of control, in order to win over new supporters.  In Kenya, for example, pro-IS voices are reportedly attempt to lure support with promises of a decrease in violence (such as the implementation of the hudud or 'set' punishments for certain crimes such as murder and theft in Islamic criminal law) and lower taxes than with Al-Shabab."

"Despite being on different sides of the Syrian civil war, Putin has managed to bring Riyadh into its diplomatic orbit through cooperation on oil policy, given how both Saudi-led OPEC states and Russia need substantially higher prices for government budgets to break even."

"...[I]s it really necessary to distort the facts so much to gain public attention? We should not need to suggest that nearly every Liberian woman was raped to care about the actual, dire situation facing many Liberian women."

"Using migration as an instrument of state-level coercion is nothing new. Since the 1951 Refugee Convention came into force, there have been at least 75 attempts by state and nonstate actors to use displaced people as means to political, military, and economic ends. Coercers' demands have ranged from the simple provision of financial aid to requests for full-scale invasion and assistance in effecting regime change."