“Perilous Desert will be an invaluable primer to the challenges” of the Sahara/Sahel region, said Dr. J. Peter Pham in a book review of Perilous Desert: Insecurity in the Sahara (edited by Frederic Wehrey & Anouar Boukhars. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2013). Review appears in The Journal of the Middle East & Africa, vol. 5, no. 1. ASMEA (Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa), Spring 2014.
Book Review:
* “Instability in the Sahel has made the once marginal region a mounting concern, not only for the African states bordering it, but, increasingly, for both Europe and the US,” writes Pham. “Boukhars notes in the final study in Perilous Desert: The destabilizing consequences of the potential spread of organized crime and militancy in the [Polisario-run] camps of Tindouf is of great concern to countries of the region… Mali accuses the Polisario of being a major player in the region’s drug-trafficking industry.” Pham adds: “Polisario-linked figures have played more than cameo roles in recent troubles throughout the region, ranging from recruiting mercenaries to defend Qaddafi to providing AQIM allies in N. Mali with fighters and, in one notorious case, Western hostages to trade for ransom.” *
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Dr. J. Peter Pham, Director, The Africa Center, Atlantic Council
Dr. J. Peter Pham
The Journal of the Middle East and Africa
April 2014
Once written off as a wasteland at the fringes of geopolitical relevance, the Sahel—the belt of territory running from Mauritania on the Atlantic Ocean to Somalia on the Indian Ocean and connecting North Africa across the Sahara Desert to tropical Africa (the name is derived from the Arabic term sāḥil, literally, “shore” or “coast,” which refers to the vegetation that, like a coastline, demarcates the limits of the Saharan “ocean” of sand)—has asserted its strategic importance with a vengeance in recent years.
That the region has become the focus of militant Islamist activities presenting significant challenges to the security and stability of a number of neighboring countries of importance as well as the potential to cause major political and economic mischief was underscored in early 2013, both by the high-profile terrorist attacks on the natural gas facility at In Amenas, Algeria, and the uranium mine at Airlit, Niger, and by the crisis in Mali. The latter eventually resulted in a French-led military intervention to stop the advance of rebels linked with al-Qaeda’s North African affiliate, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM)1; the establishment of a base for unmanned aerial vehicles operated by the U.S. military in neighboring Niger; and the deployment of what is slated to become the third-largest United Nations peacekeeping mission. The end of the year witnessed further evidence of the ripples emanating from this zone of increasing instability, further taxing the already-stressed capacities of regional states, which in turn led to more demand for the scarce resources which the international community as French troops spearheaded another multinational force which sought to prevent the collapse of government institutions in the Central African Republic from turning into an orgy of communal violence. Against this backdrop, it is no wonder that the United Nations Security Council has gone so far as to describe the Sahel as the center of a new “arc of instability” stretching “from Mauritania to Nigeria and beyond to the Horn of Africa.”2
An ancient space of movement encompassing ancient trade and migration routes, the region is strategically important for several reasons in addition to these security considerations, including its role as a bridge between the Arab (and Berber/Amazigh) Maghreb and black Sub-Saharan Africa. Notwithstanding the fixed territorial perspective introduced during the colonial era, the incredible diversity of populations and environmental conditions it embraces assures the older concept of the Sahel as a continuum for the movement peoples and goods remains incredibly durable. As one veteran scholar of the region put it half a century ago, “the heterogeneous and partially mobile population, the constant political and military interaction between the north, the desert, and the south, the littoral and ‘midstream’ belts of cities…all these have served to tie western Africa together.”3
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Footnotes:
1 See J. Peter Pham, “The Dangerous ‘Pragmatism’ of Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb,” Journal of the Middle East and Africa 2, no. 1 (January-June 2011): 15-29.
2 United Nations Security Council, “‘Arc of Instability’ Across Africa, if Left Unchecked, Could Turn Continent into Launch Pad for Larger-Scale Terrorist Attacks, Security Council Told,” Department of Public Information, 6965th meeting (SC/11004), May 13, 2013, accessed December 31, 2013, at http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2013/sc11004.doc.htm.
3. I. William Zartman, “The Sahara: Bridge or Barrier,” International Conciliation 541 (January 1963): 12.
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