The world's fastest growing continent demographically, Africa displays nearly all the features of today's global security challenges: armed conflict, terrorism, irregular migration, organized crime, great power competition, public discontent, and economic turbulence.
John Siko and Jonah Victor present their lessons from professional practice and pedagogical approach from the classroom in a concise guidebook that leads students and professionals through the most important issues, dynamics, challenges, and considerations for analysing and planning responses to security developments in Africa.
This book provides issue-by-issue primers on the causes and consequences of Africa's security challenges that include:
-how to anticipate security problems across current political and economic events
-how to analyse African security institutions and military capabilities
-how to understand historical trends across the African continent and appreciate unique variations among countries.
-how to identify key drivers of future trends
-how to connect security analysis to policy planning
Learning is supported through the following features:
- Thematic chapters which are optimized to help the reader quickly connect to the key concepts
and analytic frameworks within the field.
- The most relevant historical case studies, enabling students to engage in sophisticated analysis
and discussion.
- Connections and contrasts between the situations in North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa, which are traditionally studied separately.
- Special sections on understanding race and ethnicity, and advice on traveling in Africa.
- Chapter-end checklists of key questions to enable practical engagement with the topics covered.
Undergraduate students often struggle to understand complicated and interrelated issues such as ethnicity, religion, neo-patrimonialism, geographic idiosyncrasies, corruption or the role of the army in issues of African security. The book under review offers precisely such a much-needed text and even in an accessible style. The authors speak directly to the reader from the first pages of the book and they do not fail to deliver an accessible guide for less familiar readers of African Studies and Security.
