Sub-Saharan Africa

There is still a big gap between the discourse and the reality of what Japan wants - and what it can achieve in Africa.

This paper documents new features of Japan's diplomacy that tends to gradually integrate Africa into Japan's strategic interests.

2016 proved to be a most challenging year for Mozambique. Small-scale conflict, which started reappearing between the government and the opposition party, the Mozambican National Resistance (Renamo), in 2013, intensified over the course of the year, whilst peace negotiations stalled.&nbsp...

For many observers, a change in perception of the African continent occurred in the 2010s. Attention has focused on the relatively high rates of economic growth and a high population growth associated with urban expansion; both indicators interpreted as promises of economic “emergence” leading...

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...

Since the fall of the Derg regime in 1991, cordial relations have developed between China and Ethiopia, forming a positive political backdrop in front of which the two countries’ interests have increasingly converged.

Has Madagascar really emerged from the crisis which started in 2009? In purely formal terms, it is customary to consider that the December 2013 presidential election ended a political sequence of relative institutional paralysis since the coup in March 2009 and the transitional...

October 2016 presented a grim test for the fourteen-year-old International Criminal Court (ICC) as three Sub-Saharan African countries, Burundi, South Africa and Gambia announced their decision to opt out of the international judicial body. 

The descent into the morass of failure seems relentless for a country that used to be, at the aftermath of its independence in 1980, the “jewel in Africa” to be carefully preserved, as former Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere advised an acclaimed Mugabe ascending into power.

The South African political landscape experienced a shock from an unlikely source; the country’s local government elections on August 3, 2016 representing the last tier of government and often overlooked in favour of national and provincial polls.