Conflict & Resilience Monitor – 29 June 2023

For a long period of time, indications have shown that Sudan was heading for another serious conflict. An article by this author and published in Arabic on various platforms in Sudan and South Sudan on 19/11/2022 was circulated widely, predicting that a major battle was in the offing between the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). In that article, the author suggested that the war would be promoted and sponsored by the Sudanese political leaders (civilians) with the support of some foreign powers. SAF and RSF would be victims of this proxy war. On 03/04/2023 the author published another article warning the Sudanese politicians and friends of Sudan that the country was heading for war and that they needed to come together and resolve their differences peacefully. On 17/04/2023 immediately after the eruption of conflict in Sudan, the author further predicted that the war would have far-reaching consequences because of tribal inclination and that it needed to be arrested as soon as possible.

On Friday 16th June, Mali’s Foreign Minister, Abdoulaye Diop, told the UN Security Council, that its 13,000-strong stabilisation mission (MINUSMA) should leave without delay. MINUSMA has tried to stabilise Mali for a decade, but Diop’s demand comes after a long period of increasingly difficult relations between the country’s junta and the UN. The junta has restricted access, curtailed mobility, and suspended rotations of UN peacekeepers making it even more difficult for the mission to fulfil its complex mandate, often in hostile terrain. It seems clear that MINUSMA must react, but how the UN Security Council decides to respond to the junta’s ultimatum will have broader and longer-term implications than the future of MINUSMA: the UN Security Council’s power and credibility are at stake and so are the future conditions for UN peacekeeping.

Despite significant efforts, the African Union, United Nations, and others have failed to stop violent conflict from recurring in many places like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mali and Sudan, to name a few. Very often, these efforts have only managed to address symptomatic factors that appear effective in the short term, but before long, violence reappears because the mainstream methodologies to resolve these conflicts seem unable to transform the underlying causes and drivers of conflict.

Africa faces several peace and security challenges such as political and electoral related issues, climate change and its trickle-down effect on food security, violent extremism, gender inequalities, refugees and humanitarian crises amongst others. The continuous cycles of leadership deficiency characterised by tyrants and retrogressive divisions along ethnic, tribal and religious lines remain a key issue that has been central to conflict. This is coupled with conflicts, which are becoming complex and volatile, due to conflict entrepreneurs and geopolitics through proxy and proxy free-for-all.

Xenophobia has been, and continues to be, one of the perennial roadblocks to reaching the aspiration of African unity. Undoubtedly, this is a complex phenomenon caused by many broader issues and social ills. Some of the broader issues include intolerance, misplaced nationalism and scapegoating often linked to political interests. Additionally, undertones of economic despair can fuel xenophobic rhetoric and violence, as locals look for scapegoats to blame for their economic challenges. This is because migrants (who often form a minority group in larger ‘local’ communities) are seen as being in better economic situations than the locals