East Africa

South Sudan on the Edge

By J. Peter Pham

Not even thirty months after it achieved independence, South Sudan teeters on the edge of a profound abyss. What started a barely week ago as an “attempted coup”—at least according to President Salva Kiir Mayardit’s version of events—quickly transformed into an orgy of ethnic violence which, in turn, precipitated a renewed call to arms by […]

Al-Shabaab’s Somali Safe Havens: A Springboard for Terror

The Africa Center’s Assistant Director Joshua Meservey argues in the Perspectives on Terrorism journal that Al-Shabaab’s September 2013 terror attack on the Westgate mall in Nairobi is not, as some have argued, a sign of the group’s desperation, but is instead evidence of its intact capabilities. Download the PDF

IntelBrief: Mixing Oil and Water in Northern Kenya

By Adrienne Chuck

Bottom Line Up Front In the past 18 months, scientists and oil exploration companies have discovered an estimated 300 million barrels of crude oil and 250 billion cubic meters of water in the impoverished county of Turkana, in northwest Kenya

Lessons from Somalia

By J. Peter Pham

State Collapse, Insurgency, and Counterinsurgency In a monograph just published by the US Army War College, Africa Center Director J. Peter Pham argues that, after years as the world’s prime example of a failed state—one that gave rise to catastrophic humanitarian crises, a wave of maritime piracy, and Islamist militancy, including an al-Qaeda-linked insurgency—Somalia appears […]

IntelBrief: Barclays and the Somali Remittances Crisis

By Amy Calfas

Bottom Line Up Front Since 2011, Somalia has struggled to maintain one of its most important revenue streams—remittances from Somalis in the diaspora—as one Western bank after another cuts financial ties with the country. Inadequate regulatory regimes have made money transfer organizations vulnerable to exploitation by terrorist groups, and financial institutions doing business with Somalia […]

Kenya Working Group Hosts Raila Odinga

The Atlantic Council’s Africa Center hosted a meeting of the Kenya Working Group with the Right Honourable Raila Odinga, former prime minister of the Republic of Kenya. Africa Center Director J. Peter Pham welcomed participants and introduced the discussion, which was moderated by Joel Barkan, senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies […]

No Hollywood Ending to Piracy off Somalia

By J. Peter Pham

The Tom Hanks movie “Captain Phillips,” which opens Friday, will focus attention — again — on piracy off the coast of Somalia. The movie, in which (spoiler alert) the bad guys get caught, unfortunately might lead you to think that this is a problem that’s been solved. After all, since the April 2009 seizure of the cargo […]

Back to Somalia?

By J. Peter Pham

This past weekend, twenty years to the day after the conclusion of the Battle of Mogadishu, the deadly firefight dramatized in Black Hawk Down that left eighteen US military personnel dead and some six dozen others wounded (Pakistani and Malaysian units with the United Nations peacekeeping force also suffered casualties as they tried to relieve […]