Publications
Articles, publications, books, tools and multimedia features from the U.S. Institute of Peace provide the latest news, analysis, research findings, practitioner guides and reports, all related to the conflict zones and issues that are at the center of the Institute’s work to prevent and reduce violent conflict.
Question And Answer
Amid a Changing Global Order, NATO Looks East
Sudan’s Crisis Offers New Lessons for Building Peace in the Sahel
Sudan’s five-week war has killed or wounded over 5,000 people, uprooted a million more — and reignited understandable frustrations over how U.S. and international policies can better prevent or respond to such upheavals. Amid heated policy debates, we should step back briefly to pinpoint lessons from this crisis that can improve our responses in Sudan and across the Sahel’s web of coups, insurgencies and extremism. Indeed, that task is urgent — both to address the complex evolutions in the region’s crises and to build support for smarter, steadier engagement, rather than a self-defeating retreat from the Sahel by global partners seeking democracy and stability.
A Coup in Niger: What It Means for Africa, U.S. and Partners
This morning’s coup d’etat in Niger only deepens the pattern of instability across Africa’s Sahel and damages what has been a rare process of fairly steady democracy building in the region. Niger’s democratically elected government has been a valued partner for African and international efforts to stabilize the Sahel against its web of insurgencies, extremist movements and military coups. Kamissa Camara, a former foreign minister of Niger’s neighbor, Mali, now an analyst on the region with USIP, says the coup underlines lessons already evident about how to improve international efforts to build democracy and peace.
In Northeast India, Manipur’s Violence Echoes Sudan’s Darfur
Rising violence this year threatens to deepen instability in India’s far northeastern region. Ominously, the bloodshed centered in India’s state of Manipur includes elements that were visible in early stages of the 20-year-old conflict in Sudan’s Darfur region. Darfur’s violence has killed or displaced millions of people and helped lead to this year’s civil war across Sudan. Tragically, both countries have seen these disparate conflicts intensify through widened opportunities for ill-governed ethnic militias and for hate speech. These evolutions have hardened local conflicts over land or water into more extreme, venomous warfare between ethnic or religious communities. Darfur’s example underscores the urgent need for responses in Manipur.
For Sahel Stability, U.S. Needs Broader, Coordinated Policy
As military coups and violent insurgencies have spread across Africa’s Sahel over the past decade, U.S. policy has professed to recognize and address their interconnections across the region, notably through the Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Partnership. Yet this effort remains insufficient to meet the scale and complexity of the violence and the underlying failures of governance.
Four Priorities for Sudan a Year into the Civil War
This week marks a year of war in Sudan. A once promising revolution that led to the overthrow in 2019 of the country’s longtime dictator, Omar al-Bashir, has devolved into a devastating civil war. The fighting started over a dispute on how to incorporate the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) into the country’s military, the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF). A year later as the conflict between the RSF and SAF grinds on, Sudan is experiencing the world’s worst displacement crisis and one of the world’s worst hunger crises in recent history.