
Alain ANTIL
Research Fellow, Director of Ifri's African Studies Center
Research Interests:
- Mauritania, Sahel, West Africa
- Social and political issues
- Security and terrorism, traffics
Alain Antil is a Research Fellow and the Director of the African Studies Center at Ifri. He also teaches at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques of Lille and at the Institut Supérieur Technique Outre-Mer (ISTOM).
Alain Antil gained his PhD in political geography at the University of Rouen. Prior to this, he was an Associate Researcher at the Laboratoire d’Etude du Développement des Régions Arides, collaborated for the International Crisis Group and regularly contributed to the revue Sciences Humaines. He taught at the University of Rouen and the University of Versailles Saint-Quentin en Yvelines.
With sluggish economies that create few jobs, soaring demographics, international aid often considered as revenue, and a security apparatus unable to protect national territory and its population, are the Sahel states losing control of their own domestic areas?
Mauritania's political system displays certain democratic qualities that go some way to meeting international standards.
By organising TICAD (Tokyo International Conference on African Development) for the first time in Africa in August 2016, Japan intended to accelerate and deepen its relationship with the continent.
France’s current presidential campaign has created an unprecedented situation fuelled by revelations and a total absence of restraint, but it has not truly taken account of the disruptions of the last year: Brexit, the attempted coup in Turkey, the election of Donald Trump, the recapturing of...
The Mauritanian President, Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz, was elected in 2009. The architect of two successful coups: in 2005 against President Maaouya Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya, and in 2008 against President Sidi Ould Cheikh Abdellahi, nowadays he is in his second and last term of office according to the...
Movements of African people, being within their countries, on the continent or heading Europe, have numerous and ancient causes. The term “migration” covers a plurality of situations with many internal as well as international implications. Therefore, reasons to migrate deserve a careful...
The Sahel, often discussed on account of its problems and crises – in particular recently, in view of the crisis in Mali – is in actual fact experiencing a new positive economic era, like the rest of the African continent. For the five countries of the Sahel region we shall be examining –...
On an initiative of the German Council of Foreign Relations (DGAP), the Study Committee for Franco-German Relations (Cerfa) of the French Institute of International Relations (IFRI) and the Polish...
A paper brought out last year treating the “Hunger Riots had made it possible, among other things, to point out the extreme difficulties encountered by the authorities in power when trying to control urban populations. Current demographic forecasts relating to sub-Saharan Africa all predict an...
Our interest in this topic stems both from our annual visits to Mauritania which started fifteen years ago, and the tiny amount of research noticed on trafficking in this country.
Days before French President Emmanuel Macron visited West and Central African leaders this week to talk security, Islamist fighters sent a defiant message -- a suicide attack on the headquarters of a five-nation force that is supposed to take the lead in fighting terrorism in the region.
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