Search results

The African Peace and Security Architecture (APSA) is a set of norms and structures developed and designed to enable Africa with its peace and security affairs. It is an important instrument that enabled Africa gain significant success in its efforts to promote stability in Africa. The APSA was designed in the early 2000s and Africa needs to fully implement its norms and fully utilize its instruments. There is also a need to address gaps and redundancies so that it fits to the current context of new internal and global challenges.

This paper addresses the challenge of security sector reform (SSR) in democratizing Sudan. The former regime developed a sprawling, expensive, corrupt, brutal and ineffective array of military forces, paramilitaries, and security units. The popular uprising that overthrew this regime sought to bring democracy, end the long-running wars in Darfur and the "Two Areas" of Southern Kordofan and Blue Nile, revitalize the economy, end corruption, and reform and downsize the security sector. All these objectives have faced formidable obstacles. Security sector reform has scarcely made it to the political agenda.

This paper discusses the principal findings of a new integrated dataset of transnational armed conflict in Africa. Existing Africa conflict datasets have systematically under-represented the extent of cross-border state support to belligerent parties in internal armed conflicts as well as the number of incidents of covert cross-border armed intervention and incidents of using armed force to threaten a neighbouring state. Based on the method of 'redescribing' datapoints in existing datasets, notably the Uppsala Conflict Data Project, the Transnational Conflict in Africa (TCA) data include numerous missing incidents of transnational armed conflict and reclassify many more. The data indicate that (i) trans-nationality is a major feature of armed conflict in Africa, (ii) most so-called 'civil wars' are internationalised and (iii) the dominant definitions of 'interstate conflict' and 'civil war' are too narrow to capture the particularities of Africa's wars. While conventional interstate war remains rare, interstate rivalry using military means is common. The dataset opens up a research agenda for studying the drivers, patterns and instruments of African interstate rivalries. These findings have important implications for conflict prevention, management and resolution policies. ; Zahlreiche Bürgerkriege, aber vergleichsweise sehr wenige zwischenstaatliche Konflikte, so lautet der Konsens in der wissenschaftlichen Literatur zu Konflikten im postkolonialen Afrika. Dieser Artikel stellt diesen Konsens nun in Frage. Basierend auf einem neuen Datensatz argumentieren die Autoren, dass transnationale Verbindungen ein wesentliches Merkmal von bewaffneten Konflikten in Afrika sind. Politische Entscheidungsträger sollten die Lösung und Prävention von Konflikten nicht länger als eine rein interne Angelegenheit für das betreffende Land betrachten. Vielmehr gilt es sowohl die politischen Interessen der Nachbarn als auch jene der dominanten Regionalmächte systematisch in die Planungen von Friedensverhandlungen und friedensfördernden Massnahmen einzubeziehen.