Dakar to Riyadh: Links for 5/31/2024
News and analysis from the Sahel, North Africa, the Horn, and the Middle East
Last week’s links are here.
General
FT: “The UAE’s Rising Influence in Africa.”
A new report from Swissaid: “On the Trail of African Gold.”
Erik Baker on the politics of New Atheism:
New Atheism came into its own during the Global War on Terror, when secular neoconservatives like Hitchens realized that the arguments being used against Anglo religious fundamentalism could be wielded very conveniently against Islamic radicalism. This offered a way to challenge the common antiwar framing of the US invasion of Iraq and other Bush-era military operations as a new Christian crusade against the Muslim world. Instead they could, against all odds, depict Bush as an almost unwitting agent of a great campaign to defend the Western Liberal Enlightenment Tradition (which reached its height in the great discoveries of modern science) against the cave-dwelling barbarians who wanted to reinstate the Dark Ages. The New Atheists of the aughts constructed an insidious conceptual conveyor belt: rejecting creationism meant believing in capital-s Science, which meant believing in Western Civilization, which in turn meant supporting or at least tolerating imperialist American wars in west Asia. Conversely, disagreeing with the New Atheists—opposing the War on Terror, doubting their just-so-stories about how evolution explained this or that human behavior—meant rejecting capital-S Science, and maybe even rationality itself.
Sahel and West Africa
Le Monde (Fr): “Au Sahel, le silence, l’exil ou la prison pour les voix critiques [In the Sahel, Silence, Exile, or Prison for Critical Voices].”
Senegal’s new (democratically elected) President Bassirou Diomaye Faye is visiting (military-ruled) Mali and Burkina Faso this week.
El-Ghassim Wane reflects on United Nations peacekeeping that he headed in Mali:
One lesson that the experience in Mali has abundantly made clear is that political partnership between the United Nations and African actors (regional and subregional organizations and relevant individual countries) is paramount. It will never be emphasized enough that peacekeeping is fundamentally a political endeavour and that the situation in Mali is first and foremost a political and governance crisis for which a purely security response is woefully inadequate. Concretely, this means that the United Nations and the African actors should consult more closely with each other and align their strategies, ensure that their efforts are mutually supportive, and maximize their ability to influence the course of events, including by leveraging the rich normative framework developed by the AU and its regional groupings on governance, human rights, peace and security and putting in place requisite coordination mechanisms both in the field and between respective headquarters. Such enhanced collaboration should also involve support to United Nations peacekeeping missions as they confront practical challenges that impair their efficacy, for instance impediments to the freedom of movement.
In Nigeria’s Kano State, Governor Abba Yusuf reinstated Muhammadu Sanusi II as Emir of Kano, one of the most powerful hereditary offices in the country - and the reinstatement has proven quite contentious.
A new report (.pdf) from the International Crisis Group: “JAS vs. ISWAP: The War of the Boko Haram Splinters.”
Al Jazeera (Ar) on marriage customs in Niger.
North Africa
Human Rights Watch on threats to freedom of expression in Tunisia.
Rural unemployment is a “time bomb” in Morocco, this report argues (Fr).
Jadaliyya interviews Dr. Sara Rahnama on her book The Future Is Feminist: Women and Social Change in Interwar Algeria (Cornell, 2023):
Until recently, much of the scholarship on colonial Algeria has come from a French history lens and relied on French-language sources and archives in France exclusively. In graduate school I began seriously learning Arabic to be able to bring in a new set of sources, which unsurprisingly revealed many connections to similar discussions about women happening across the Middle East. The Arabic-language press also allowed me to see more clearly how ideas about Islam were informing this new feminism and concern for women’s status that was emergent in the interwar years. In recent years, more scholars have connected the dynamics they analyze in colonial Algeria to the broader Middle East and I am glad to see more scholarship on colonial Algeria in spaces like the Middle East Studies Association conferences because it signals to me that more scholars are thinking through these regional connections.
The Greater Horn of Africa
Multiple journalistic reports have come out this week detailing the impact of Sudan’s civil war on cities such as El Fasher (Darfur) and Omdurman.
On May 28, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken telephoned General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan of the Sudanese Armed Forces, one of the two main factions in the war and generally recognized as the de facto official leader of Sudan. Blinken called for a new round of negotiations through a mechanism called the Jeddah platform - the analyst Kholood Khair is skeptical that can work right now.
Politico’s Nahal Toosi argues that U.S. Ambassador to Kenya Meg Whitman is “trying to be a different kind of U.S. ambassador.” Reading the article, though, I honestly didn’t see anything new in the approach - it’s just pro-business and cozy with the incumbent; Whitman simply happens to have a higher profile and more access than most U.S. ambassadors.
Mashriq
Liat Kozma and Wiessam Abu Ahmad, writing in Haaretz: “Why Gaza's Death Toll Is Probably Higher Than Reported.”
The former head of the Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, allegedly threatened a chief prosecutor of the international criminal court in a series of secret meetings in which he tried to pressure her into abandoning a war crimes investigation, the Guardian can reveal.
Yossi Cohen’s covert contacts with the ICC’s then prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, took place in the years leading up to her decision to open a formal investigation into alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in occupied Palestinian territories.
BBC (Ar): “Qissat Imarat Sharq al-Urdun Qabla an Tusbih al-Mamlaka al-Urduniyya al-Hashimiyya [The Story of the East Jordan Emirate Before It Became the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan].”
Christopher Phillips: “Why It Suits Jordan If Everyone Thinks It's on the Brink.”