Africa Center Commentary & Analysis

Transition Seminar for The Hon. Helen La Lime

By The Atlantic Council

The Atlantic Council’s Africa Center hosted a transition seminar for the Hon. Helen La Lime, the recently confirmed US ambassador to the Republic of Angola. The not-for-attribution session was moderated by Africa Center Director J. Peter Pham and Atlantic Council Treasurer and Executive Committee Board Director Brian C. McK. Henderson. Guests included representatives from private […]

Nigeria’s Boko Haram: More virulent, more capable, ‘closer to a classic guerrilla insurgency’

By AfricaSource

Nigeria’s Boko Haram militant movement has grown increasingly virulent since 2009, a change visible in the group’s capacity, tactics and ideology, according to J. Peter Pham, director of the Africa Center at the Atlantic Council. Pham testified before the House Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, Global Human Rights, and International Organizations on June 11, nearly […]

Discussion with the Burkinabé minister of human rights and civil promotion

By Africa Center

In 2012, the West African nation of Burkina Faso created a Ministry for Human Rights and Civic Promotion to promote physical security, economic prosperity, and access to health and education for all Burkinabé citizens. Since its inception, the ministry has actively promoted gender equity, a focus that is consistent with Ouagadougou’s priorities: a 2009 law […]

Nigeria’s Missing Daughters: What a Hashtag Might Do

By Justine Jablonska and James Rupert

On the night of April 14, 2014, armed men of Nigeria’s puritanical Boko Haram movement drove cargo trucks across the arid scrubland of northeast Nigeria, rumbling up an unlit, dirt road in the town of Chibok. They stopped at the Government Girls’ Secondary School. Shouting in the dark, they ordered the more than 200 boarding […]

High Hopes for a More Robust American Role in Africa

By Atlantic Council

If one country has benefited from American and European neglected of Africa over the past decade or so, it has been China. In the absence of significant American and European investment on the African continent, particularly below the Sahara, China’s trade with the area increased, between 2001 and 2011, from $20 billion to $120 billion.

Bronwyn Bruton on Boko Haram

By Bronwyn Bruton

On April 14, 2014, more than 200 female students were kidnapped from a school in Nigeria. In May, news of that kidnapping went viral. In a series of videos, Deputy Director Bronwyn Bruton discusses why the social media response to the event has been so huge, its short- and long-term implications, as well as the […]

A Discussion with the Angola Open Policy Initiative

The Southern African nation of Angola has made commendable economic progress since emerging from a twenty-seven-year long civil war in 2002. Rich in natural resources, it has become Africa’s second largest oil producer and has enjoyed a decade of strong GDP growth while gaining in global importance—in 2009, the United States identified Angola as one […]

US help against Boko Haram: “Everything we can do” is not very much

By Bronwyn Bruton

Amid surging public outrage in Nigeria and abroad over Boko Haram’s kidnapping of 223 schoolgirls, President Barack Obama has promised that the United States will do “everything it can” to rescue them. His promise follows a pledge by Secretary of State John Kerry to do “everything possible” to help the Nigerian government defeat Boko Haram, […]