Listening to Niger’s President Mahamadou Issofou’s recent interview on Al Jazeera one comes away with the impression that everything in Niger is fine except for the terrible things that are going on across its borders: gun drunk anarchists in Libya,

Read the rest of Niger: President Issoufou’s Crazy Neighborhood – By Michael Keating »

The recent outbreak of violence in northern Mali will have given governments across the Sahel with their own Tuareg populations pause for thought. While regional attention has been diverted in recent years by the threat posed by Islamic militant groups

Read the rest of Malian crisis: Tuareg rebellion could spark regional violence in Mali, Niger and Southern Algeria – By Celeste Hicks »

Last week the United Nations announced that famine conditions in Somalia had eased, thanks to a good harvest and strong response from the humanitarian community. It warned, however, that failure to continue to respond could have dire consequences and urged

Read the rest of A Tale of Two Food Crises: How to Respond, not Whether to Respond – By Laura Hammond »

Just two years after the Sahel faced a major food crisis, leaving an estimated seven million people in need of food aid in Niger and Chad, the alarm bell has sounded again. Following poor and erratic rains in the 2011

Read the rest of Food Crisis in the Sahel – a region in need of long term solutions – By Celeste Hicks »

In December 2011 two new groups claimed responsibility for kidnaps in northwest Africa. On 7 December, the Mauritanian ANI news agency said it had received a video from a group called ‘al-Qaeda in Nigeria’, showing a British engineer kidnapped on

Read the rest of Northwest Africa kidnap claims by new groups suggest growing competition for ransoms – By Exclusive Analysis »

Chatham House, Thurs 9th Dec, 2011 Participants: Robert Fowler, Former UN Special Envoy to Niger Jérôme Spinoza, Head, Africa Bureau, French Ministry of Defence Dr Knox Chitiyo, Associate Fellow, Royal United Services Institute Chair: Camilla Toulmin, Director, International Institute for

Read the rest of Western Sahel insecurity – groping towards a more integrated approach »

Until last week, Niger’s main pre-occupation was the consolidation of democracy following peaceful elections in February. President Mahamadou Issoufou was determinedly continuing with an energetic anti-corruption drive in the face of an alleged coup plot back in July. This was

Read the rest of Niger and Gadaffi – fallout out from the Libyan crisis: ‘We have no means to close the border… It is too big’ – By Celeste Hicks »

So why didn’t NATO planes bomb the armed convoy that headed from Libya into Niger on Tuesday? Two possible answers: One it was part of a withdrawal deal that NATO knew about. Two that they suspected the Gaddafi was in

Read the rest of Libya’s neighbours’ longer term – By Richard Dowden »

In the early days following the rise of the insurgency in Libya, it was widely reported that Col. Gaddafi was making an extensive use of foreign mercenaries to defend his regime. Tuaregs from Mali and Niger, and, more specifically, ex-rebels,

Read the rest of Mali and Niger Tuareg insurgencies and the war in Libya: ‘Whether you liked him or not, Gadaffi used to fix a lot of holes’ – By Frédéric Deycard and Yvan Guichaoua »

The desert interior of West Africa, from Mauritania to southern Algeria and from northern Niger to northern Mali covers around 3.5 million square kilometres – an area sixteen times the size of the UK with a population of less than

Read the rest of Terrorism in the Sahara and Sahel: A ‘false flag’ in the War on Terror? – By Richard Trillo »