The persistence of insecurity and instability in parts of North Africa and the Sahel belt has benefited the numerous armed non-state actors in the region including separatist groups, terrorists, and transnational criminal networks engaged in the smuggling of drugs, weapons, and people. The African Peace and Security Architecture (APSA), the African Union’s (AU) set of […]
The Social Science Research Council’s African Peacebuilding Network (APN) had the opportunity to sit down with Dr. Abosede Babatunde, an APN alumnus (Individual Research Grant 2016) and lecturer at the Center for Peace and Strategic Studies, University of Ilorin, Nigeria. The interview was conducted at the Social Science Research Council, Brooklyn, New York on June […]
This is a cross-post from Items, a Social Science Research Council digital forum that renews and reimagines the Council’s former newsletter as a space for engagement with our work and with the social sciences more generally. Ebunoluwa O. Popoola was a Next Generation Social Sciences in Africa fellow in 2012. After six decades of oil production […]
At the end of July 2017, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) announced that the number of internally displaced people (IDPs) in the Central African Republic (CAR) had reached 600,000. The number of refugees, most of whom are in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Cameroon, had reached 480,000. This recent […]
Today, more than 600 million young people globally live in fragile and conflict-affected areas, a large proportion of them in Africa. 1 Considering that a rising youth population in Africa—the fastest growing in the world —intersects with a number of threats to peace and security on the continent, it is no wonder that this growth, […]
Since 2000, the issue of violent extremism has risen to the highest levels of national, regional, and global concern. While prevention is generally pursued through coercive hard power such as military-dominated peace support operations and surveillance, this has proven effective only to a certain extent. It has also come at a high cost, both financially […]
