Africa’s security landscape defies easy summary, spanning everything from long-running insurgencies to fragile political transitions and disputes over land and resources that periodically tip into open violence. Crisis Insights follows developments across the continent, from the Sahel’s expanding jihadist insurgencies and military-led governments to the Great Lakes region’s recurring cycles of armed conflict and displacement.
In West Africa, the collapse of state authority across large stretches of the Sahel has allowed armed groups affiliated with al-Qaeda and the Islamic State to expand their territorial reach, even as a wave of military coups has reshaped the region’s governments and its relationships with traditional international partners. Further south and east, the Great Lakes region continues to grapple with the long aftershocks of the 1990s conflicts that drew in much of Central Africa, particularly in the mineral-rich borderlands of eastern Congo.
The Horn of Africa presents its own distinct set of pressures, where drought, food insecurity, and long-standing political rivalries interact with active insurgencies and periodic interstate tension. Elsewhere on the continent, disputes over resource wealth, contested elections, and unresolved questions of federalism and regional autonomy continue to generate friction that occasionally escalates into armed confrontation.
Our coverage aims to track these situations as they develop, providing context on the political and historical roots of each conflict alongside analysis of where things may be headed, rather than treating each outbreak of violence as an isolated event disconnected from the broader dynamics shaping the region.