After years of deliberation, repeated condemnations and the eventual deployment of UN and EU troops, Darfurian communities continue to be threatened by expulsion, rape, famine and extermination in a strife-torn region. Darfur is not only a testimony to the atrocities committed by the apocalyptic Janjaweed horsemen and by Sudan’s very own armed forces in response to rebel factions demanding greater independence and power; it equally serves as a reminder of the world’s continuous and collective failure to effectively interfere in the gravest man-made catastrophes of our time.

Death rates in Congo remain far higher than elsewhere in Africa despite years of relative peace and elections that were designed to bring stability to the beleaguered nation, according to a report released Tuesday by the International Rescue Committee. From January 2006 to April 2007, sporadic conflict and related effects such as closure of clinics and disruption of food supplies caused the deaths of approximately 727,000 people, the group estimated.

On 6 February 2007, the president announced the establishment of a tenth unified combatant command called Africa Command, or "AFRICOM." Its area of responsability will cover Africa, and it will have an unprecedented number of interagency civilians in leadership roles.

While most Americans were preoccupied with the holidays, Bowl games, and the Iowa caucus, Kenya had a presidential election. As African elections go, it went off pretty well. There were long lines, and a record number of people were estimated to have voted. While there were some reported problems—shortage of ballots, attempted intimidation, etc.—it worked well enough at the local level. Raw results showed that the challenger Raila Odinga defeated the incumbent Mwai Kibaki by about a million votes and that most of Kibaki’s cabinet members were voted out in the accompanying parliamentary poll. So far so good.

The Darfur conflict has changed radically in the past year and not for the better. While there are many fewer deaths than during the high period of fighting in 2003-2004, it has mutated, the parties have splintered, and the confrontations have multiplied. Violence is again increasing, access for humanitarian agencies is decreasing, international peacekeeping is not yet effective and a political settlement remains far off. The strategy the African Union (AU)/UN mediation has been following cannot cope with this new reality and needs to be revised. After a highly publicised opening ceremony in Sirte, Libya, on 27 October 2007, the new peace talks have been put on hold. The mediation should use this opportunity to reformulate the process, broadening participation and addressing all the conflict’s root causes.

As a political community, Somalia has disintegrated. The country has now reached the limit of its devolutionary cycle, which began in December 2006, when Ethiopia mounted a military intervention that ousted the Islamic Courts Council (I.C.C.) from control over most of southern and central Somalia. The Courts movement, which sought to institute an Islamic state based on Shari'a law, had provided the first possibility for Somalia's political integration since 1991, when the brutal dictatorship of Siad Barre was overthrown by a divided group of clan-based resistance movements, whose leaders could not or would not agree on a power-sharing formula to keep a political community intact.

I arrived in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania in December 1985, my first experience of the African continent. It was at the tail end of Julius Nyerere’s long tenure as president of the United Republic. A hero of decolonisation, Nyerere had achieved much in forging a nation from a constellation of a hundred or more tribes. In fostering a national language, mandating universal education, and developing national consciousness and harmony among Tanzania’s disparate faiths and peoples, Nyerere had attained more than virtually any of his contemporaries. But, in economic terms, his government had failed badly. In fact, I think that my first month in Dar es Salaam may have coincided with Tanzania’s economic nadir. You see, the country had literally run out of fuel. With the exception of government ministers and a select few senior officials, fuel was simply not available to anyone, anywhere.

As PINR forecast on September 19, the failures of the two national conferences aimed at devising a political formula for Somalia -- the National Reconciliation Conference (N.R.C.) sponsored by the country's internationally-recognized Transitional Federal Government (T.F.G.), and the Somali Congress for Liberation and Reconstitution (S.C.L.R.) organized by the political opposition based in Eritrea -- have led to a continuation of Somalia's spiral into political fragmentation and conflict. As an armed insurgency against the T.F.G. ratcheted up significantly in Somalia's official capital Mogadishu, rifts opened up in the transitional institutions, with conflict surfacing between the T.F.G.'s president, Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, and its prime minister, Ali Mohamed Gedi; parliament demanding accountability from Gedi's government; and the arrest of Somalia's chief supreme court justice, Yusuf Ali Harun, followed by the sacking of the public prosecutor who initiated the case by Gedi and the prosecutor's refusal to leave his post.

De los 53 jefes de Estado que hay actualmente en África, 12 llevan más de 20 años gobernando, 2 son octogenarios y 14 han superado los 70 años. En muy pocos países africanos ha habido una evolución política seria. Los dirigentes se aferran a un poder que conlleva honor y riqueza.

China’s expanding engagement in Africa has captured world attention. Chinese leaders make regular, lengthy visits to the continent, and Beijing feted leaders from 48 African nations at the third China-Africa summit in November 2006. China has significantly ramped up contributions to UN peacekeeping forces in Africa and now has nearly 1,300 servicemen and police on the ground in six separate blue-helmet missions there. Beijing has even become more involved in resolving the Darfur crisis in Sudan, placing some greater pressure on Sudan to accept an expanded and strengthened African Union force in the country. China is also expanding its development assistance to Africa, with massive infrastructure projects, debt forgiveness, new loans, and increased resources for public health, education, and training. China’s complex and expanding role in Africa presents challenges and opportunities to Western and African interests and deserves far more nuanced and in-depth analysis.

Chinese President and Communist Party chief Hu Jintao’s recent African sojourn reveals both China’s newfound global clout and the persisting limits to the PRC’s stature as an aspiring great power, especially outside its region.

Security Sector Reform (SSR) is one of the four major objectives pursued by the Liberian government as it rebuilds after the fifteen-year civil war. The innovative approaches and framework employed by the government of Liberia and the international community to reform the Liberian security sector after the civil war were discussed at a meeting of the Liberia Working Group, an initiative of the United States Institute of Peace. The meeting, which took place on February 21, 2007 featured Ambassador Jacques Paul Klein, former United Nations special representative of the secretary general in Liberia (UNSRSG), and Andy Michels and Sean McFate, co-founders of Interlocutor Group. The panelists provided an overview of the policy framework used for security reform in post-conflict Liberia and the challenges facing Liberia in rebuilding its security services.

On April 4, the U.S. Institute of Peace convened its Sudan Peace Forum to discuss new strategies for dealing with the ongoing crisis in Darfur. This USIPeace Briefing summarizes the discussion, which was conducted on a not-for-attribution basis. It was written by David Smock, the vice president of USIP's Center for Mediation and Conflict Resolution. It does not represent the views of USIP, which does not advocate specific policies.

Son cada vez más las voces que se elevan para denunciar el neocolonialismo de París, sobre todo su apoyo a ciertos regímenes autoritarios. Se están observando unos cambios que ponen en tela de juicio las formas clásicas de la presencia gala en el continente negro. Estas denuncias de la injerencia francesa se producen al mismo tiempo que empresas como Pinault o Bolloré, antaño muy presentes, parecen desinteresarse por el África francófona. Una situación que abre muchos interrogantes sobre la evolución de las relaciones privilegiadas entre Francia y sus ex colonias africanas.

The mid-2006 deployment of EU troops in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to assist UN peacekeepers in overseeing elections there drove home the point that sub-Saharan Africa will be a focal point of EU security and outreach, along with the Balkans. What lessons can be learned from EUFOR DRC and other operations in the region, and how can the EU reconcile its military operations there with its insistence that African nations must take ownership of their own security? How can we improve cooperation with UN and African Union peace efforts and are the implications of the EU’s Africa Strategy for future support missions there?

Recent rebel activities in Central African Republic (CAR) and Chad have called international attention to political crises within both countries, as well as to the relationships between these countries and Sudan. In CAR, two rebel groups operate in the north. In Chad, various rebel groups continue to challenge President Idriss Deby's authority, particularly in the eastern part of the country.

The November 2005 elections in Liberia marked the end of a two-year transition period and ushered in a democratically elected government led by President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf. She faces the enormous task of consolidating peace after fourteen years of conflict.

Over the past five years, Africa has made great progress in establishing an institutional architecture in order to tackle the continent’s manifold security problems. The United States has increasingly been supporting this effort through a variety of capacity building programs and initiatives designed to enable Africa to help itself. However, while much has been written about U.S. military capacity building initiatives like the African Crisis Response Force (ACRF) and the African Crisis Response Initiative (ACRI).

As the United States military forces execute Theater Security Cooperation (TSC) activities in support of the Global War on Terror and Homeland Defense overseas, the development of non-traditional partners requires a variety of non-traditional engagement activities and the discovery of new tools to be applied. Defense Support to Public Diplomacy (DSPD) and Military Support to Public Diplomacy (DSPD) move to the fore of all the functional capabilities U.S. forces can provide, a non-traditional role for the Department of Defense.

There is growing awareness that the vast resources and potential in the Gulf of Guinea are being undermined by multifaceted domestic, regional and international threats and vulnerabilities. Rather than contributing to stability and economic prosperity for countries in this sub-region, pervasive insecurity in this resource-laden maritime environment has resulted in more than $2 billion in annual financial losses, significantly constrained investment and economic prospects, growing crime and potentially adverse political consequences.

Rumors of a United States Africa Command that surfaced in January 2006 appeared to become reality in December. As Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld left his position, he presented to President Bush for approval a plan for a special geographic combatant command dedicated to Africa.If approved, the establishment of United States Africa Command (AFRICOM) will mark a significant step in the recognition of Africa as strategically important by the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). In addition, other branches of government would interact more closely as this headquarters would contain significant additional representation across all government agencies.

During the Cold War, United States foreign policy toward Sub-Saharan Africa had little to do with Africa. As with other developing regions, African countries were first and foremost pawns in the great global chess game. Republican and Democratic Administrations alike supported American clients and sought to undermine Soviet ones. Economic and military assistance was directed to key allies, such as Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire and Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, and anticommunist rebel organizations, such as Jonas Savimbi's UNITA (União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola) in Angola.[2] Because the U.S. perceived few if any direct strategic or economic interests in Africa, engagement with the region was largely defined by Cold War logic from the late 1950s until the late 1980s, and remained relatively limited.

Africa has never held a central position in U.S. foreign policy, having little strategic significance and lacking a strong and organized domestic lobby to push the continent’s issues onto the U.S. foreign policy agenda. Therefore, it came as a surprise to many that the Bush Administration may actually have done more for Africa than its more liberal predecessors, once rhetoric is weighed against reality. The post-9/11 landscape has radically changed the prioritization of Africa in the United States’ concept of its strategic interests and the amount of assistance to the continent has accordingly increased.

Le gouvernement de transition somalien, appuyé par l’armée éthiopienne, a pris le dessus sur les miliciens islamiques après une semaine de combats et promis hier l’amnistie à ceux qui déposeraient les armes.

Since late October, instability has hit the Central African Republic (C.A.R.) as a rebel movement in the northeast is threatening the government in Bangui. The rebels have taken control over towns in the northeast of the country, such as Birao, Ouanda Djalle and Sam-Ouandja, near the Chad-Sudan border. There is concern, however, that the rebels will push south toward Bria, a diamond mining town, and then possibly make an attempt against the capital.

S'il n'en reste qu'un, Denis Sassou-Nguesso pourrait bien être celui-là. Dans un pré carré francophone en voie de délitement, le président du Congo- Brazzaville, au pouvoir depuis 1997, occupe la place du “monsieur Loyal” de la Françafrique, l'homme sur lequel Paris sait pouvoir compter en toutes circonstances. Seul Omar Bongo, l'inoxydable président du Gabon et par ailleurs gendre de Sassou, est en mesure de lui disputer ce titre.

Le Darfour, signifiant «patrie des Four») est une région de l'ouest du Soudan, dans le désert du Sahara. Elle est majoritairement peuplée par des populations musulmanes comme l'est le Soudan (sauf dans sa partie sud à majorité animiste). Administrativement, le Darfour se compose de plusieurs provinces : Gharb Darfour (capitale Al-Genaïna), Chamal Darfour (capitale Al Fachir) et Djanoub Darfour (capitale Nyala).

L’attaque le 23 mai de bases militaires dans le Nord fait craindre un retour aux années de braise et relance la polémique que le rôle de Kaddafi dans la région.

Failed states offer attractive venues for terrorist groups seeking to evade counterterrorism efforts of the United States and its partners in the Global War on Terror (GWOT). State failure entails, among its other features, the disintegration and criminalization of public security forces, the collapse of the state administrative structure responsible for overseeing those forces, and the erosion of infrastructure that supports their effective operation. These circumstances make identification of terrorist groups operating within failed states very difficult, and action against such groups, once identified, problematic.

Con apenas 1,6 millones de habitantes, suelos pobres y prolongadas sequías, Botswana posee el récord mundial de crecimiento económico de los últimos 45 años, por encima incluso de China. Desde 1961 ha duplicado su Producto Interno Bruto cada siete años.

For those wondering when they really must start paying attention to Africa, U.S. Gen. James Jones deploys every fragment of his 6-foot-5 frame to emphasize with a forward lean that the time is now. Why else would the U.S. military's European Command, which he runs, spend 70% of its time and energy on Africa, he says, up from nearly none when he took it over three-plus years ago?

This reality therefore compels us to gain insights and build up knowledge about the activities of the African diaspora in the EU countries in the conflicts in homeland. A knowledge that will equip us to explore possibilities of a new attitude that would enable African diaspora groups to relate to one another and to the conflict back home in new and more constructive ways.

Annan told the Financial Times in an interview it was vital for African countries to break their silence to protect the continent's credibility in the eyes of the world.

Mugabe and the ZANU-PF party used more sophisticated methods than previously but they manipulated the electoral process through a range of legal and extra-legal means to ensure that the election was basically decided well before the first voters reached the polls.

The recent fighting in North Kivu displaced over 100,000 people into the forests, where many died due to the harsh conditions. According to the International Rescue Committee (IRC), 31,000 die every month in the country as a result of the war, mostly due to hunger and disease. Since 1998, an estimated 3.8 million deaths have been attributable to the war.