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.
The Current Situation in Nigeria
In 2023, the Network of Nigerian Facilitators (NNF) helped the Kaduna State peacebuilding institutions negotiate, draft and implement a peace agreement between local groups to resolve a long-standing and violent communal conflict. The agreement built on a 2019 peace agreement also supported by the NNF to resolve a cross-border conflict involving many of the same groups in neighboring Plateau State.
For Peace in Africa, Boost Regional Blocs — Like West Africa’s ECOWAS
As the United States and international partners work to stabilize Africa’s Sahel region — and to prevent its warfare, violent extremism and armed coups from metastasizing into Africa’s densely populous and strategic Atlantic coast — the West African multinational bloc, ECOWAS, has proven its value in resolving crises and promoting stability. Yet, as global security threats have evolved, ECOWAS, like other multinational bodies, needs updated capacities to meet new challenges. International democracies’ most effective initiative to support West Africa’s stability would be to partner with West Africans to strengthen their vital regional community. A similar strategy is valid across Africa.
To Help Stabilize West Africa, Bolster a Key Partner: Nigeria
Continued violence in West Africa is sharpening America’s critical challenge to reduce extremism and violence, particularly in the Sahel. Violent deaths in three western Sahel nations surged by 38% last year and Niger’s coup has complicated the U.S. military role in the region. The violence is likely to spread further this year into coastal West Africa, a region five times more populous, with commensurately greater security implications for Africa, the United States and the world. A vital partner in stabilizing both regions is Nigeria, and U.S. institutions should consider several priorities for helping it do so.
Linking Early Warning and Early Response Networks to Curb Violence in West Africa
A conflict early warning and early response (EWER) ecosystem has been developing in West Africa as multilateral organizations, governments, civil society groups, and others have established systems that detect threats and provide critical information to relevant authorities. Yet individual EWER systems are prone to a range of failures—from gaps in data to decision-making bottlenecks to response coordination breakdowns. This report argues that linking individual systems—a network-of-networks approach—can improve outcomes for people across West Africa and serve as a model for other conflict-affected regions around the world.
Liberia Shows a Path Toward Democracy in West Africa
Liberia’s presidential inauguration last week, a peaceful transfer of power between opposed political parties, strengthens its postwar democracy — an achievement that we should highlight as an instructive counterpoint to West Africa’s military coups and other erosions of democracy. While 5 million Liberians confront crises including poverty, corruption and poor infrastructure, their progress in stabilizing from decades of war offers lessons for us all. Liberians’ vital strengths in this peaceful transfer include strong political will, reflected in record voter turnout, and a potent civic history of nonviolent movements for change, buttressed by U.S. support in countering corruption.
Joseph Sany on Secretary Blinken’s Africa Tour
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken recently made diplomatic stops across West Africa to continue building U.S.-Africa cooperation. However, USIP’s Joseph Sany says, “The U.S. has to ensure that the speeches are followed by deed,” adding that “African countries will also have to play their part.”
West Africa’s Leaders Face the High Stakes of Niger’s Coup
Amid the global challenges to building international stability and peace, a crisis increasingly forcing itself to the foreground — even amid those of record human displacement, climate degradation and unresolved wars — is the plunge by six countries across Africa’s Sahel region into coups d’état and military rule. Eight coups since 2020 have left 150 million people under rule by their armed forces. The latest coup, in Niger, is drawing a heightened international response, and a key player, the 15-nation West African community, today that it will pursue a long campaign of economic and diplomatic pressure, and that it sees military force as a last resort.
Countering Coups: How to Reverse Military Rule Across the Sahel
Three years of coups around Africa’s Sahel region — eight of them in six nations, from Guinea on the Atlantic to Sudan on the Red Sea — leave many African and other policymakers frustrated over how to respond. The Sahel’s crises have uprooted more than 4 million people and could add millions more to our record levels of global human migration as Africa’s population grows and its climate destabilizes. Yet the pattern of coups and other evidence — notably from USIP’s Sahel fieldwork, counter-coup research and bipartisan analysis teams — offer guidelines for effective responses by African, U.S. and international policymakers.
After Nigeria’s Elections: Nurturing the Seeds of Better Democracy
Nigeria’s latest elections heighten the country’s need for a reset of its democracy. Nigeria’s two dominant parties abandoned an informal pact that has rotated power between north and south, papering over the deeper, wider problem of ensuring real political inclusion among Nigeria’s disparate regions and communities. The recent national and state-level votes failed to deliver anguished Nigerians the promise of wider voter participation and transparent election results. Still, the campaigns and voting contained seeds for critical change that now must be cultivated by Nigeria’s newly elected government; its courageous, pro-democracy civil society; its vast, energized youth population; and its partners.
Vice President Harris Helps Focus on Ghana, West Africa
Vice President Kamala Harris’ choice of Ghana this week as the place to launch her show of U.S. commitment to a new partnership with Africa can be no surprise. Ghana is one of Africa’s more established democracies and is at the center of the coastal West Africa region that the United States has targeted for focused efforts to prevent instability and the spread of extremism that is driving insurgencies in the neighboring Sahel region. As Ghana confronts that threat, notably in its vulnerable north, its community and civil society groups form an essential resource that partners should support.