Security Issues

How transparent are the Democratic Republic of Congo’s regional strategies?

On December 13, 2013, in response to an Interpol initiative, the first ever African Conference on pharmaceutical crime was held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Its final communiqué declared the intention of 20 countries to reinforce the struggle against the production of counterfeit drugs.

Both perpetrators and forms of violence change. States are no longer the central referents of contemporary conflicts. We can no longer understand them as the outcome of a linear history starting from tribal societies and leading to Western political structures.

Displaced peoples, insecurity over food and sanitation, economic devastation, worsening community tensions: the Central African Republic is going through what must be the worst crisis in its history.

On 24 August 2011, President Idriss Déby Itno of Chad recognised the National Transitional Council (NTC) as the only legitimate authority in Libya. Until then, the Chadian president had been a firm ally of the Guide of the Great Jahamiriya, President Qaddafi of Libya. Déby had sustained his...

Except for its extreme poverty and the disastrous effects of a series of droughts, the Sahel region has been largely out of the spotlight of international attention in the past. Yet the rise of terrorism and especially the creation of Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) in 2007 brought the...

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...

Besides the ongoing political conundrum in Mali, it is the entire West African region, from Guinea Bissau to Mali, which is under threat of destabilization. Indeed, for many years now, terrorists and drugs traffickers have been synergizing their respective illegal activities, transforming the...

In the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) 32 years of dictatorship and almost ten years of war have bled the country dry and left its administration incapable of providing the population with basic services and the government incapable of applying or even formulating public policy.

The multifaceted crisis in Mali, which has effectively led to state collapse and split the country in two, has drawn international attention to Algeria’s role in the stability of the Sahel. One might expect Algeria, as the region’s preeminent military power, and one that has sought to position...