Africa

Expert on jihadi-insurgent groups Christopher Anzalone talks about the recent activity and future of the jihadist group Al-Shabaab in Somalia.

Which armed groups have perpetrated sexual violence in recent conflicts? This article presents patterns from the new Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict (SVAC) dataset. The dataset, coded from the three most widely used sources in the quantitative human rights literature, covers 129 active conflicts, and the 625 armed actors involved in these conflicts, during the period 1989–2009.

This article shows how international humanitarian aid, particularly food aid, has played an instrumental role in perpetuating chronic civil war and state collapse in Somalia from 1992–2012. During the 1992 famine, food aid created lucrative opportunities for criminal elements of the Somali business community, who partnered with local warlords to create an enduring system of corruption and aid dependence. International aid financed this elite pact between business and warlords, which subsequently undermined domestic processes of order-making and reduced the bargaining power of local communities in the peace-building process.

Nation-states fail because they can no longer deliver positive political goods to their people.

The demonstrated link among poor governance, poverty, and nation-state failure makes strengthening the quality of governance in the developing world an urgent task.

Africa's rampant conflict (in recent months in the western Sudan and in
Uganda) and strikingly slow economic development (as compared to Asia and Latin America) stems in large part from poor governance and deficient leadership.

Good governance is essential if citizens of nation-states or subordinate political jurisdictions seek to maximize their inalienable rights assubjects, taxpayers, or mere residents of the polities to which they owe or are compelled to pay allegiance.

When states fail to provide their citizens with security and rule of law, local and regional actors must step in to fill the void. Such intervention provides a temporary solution, but as time passes warlords and other groups can and do gain some degree of legitimacy, which further prevents a functioning central government from emerging. Somalia in particular faces serious challenges of state revival. Its weak transitional federal government could, however, explore a mediated state model, which—though problematic—might be the "best bad option" for Somalia.

"Poor leadership has been the depressing norm in Africa for decades. But as a bold new initiative by a group of past and present African leaders takes off, good governance may finally come to the continent."