A comparative study of Mali and Niger to determine possible differences that may have influenced the path of the 2012 Tuareg rebellion. Specifically, it seeks to determine if (1) the degree of governmental decentralization achieved after multiple peace agreements led to less government control in one country over the other, and (2) the counterinsurgency strategies applied by each country during previous rebellions could have led the rebels to believe Mali would be a softer target to attack than Niger. The evidence indicates that despite an earlier start and an intense public relations campaign, Mali did not achieve a significantly different level of decentralization than Niger by 2011, removing it as a possible influence on the 2012 rebellion. Both countries created new community level governments charged with administering all aspects of civil services but lacked the revenue to operate without international assistance. The difference in counterinsurgency strategies between the two countries, however, is stark. Mali's habitual willingness to compromise with past rebel groups contrasts greatly with Niger's insistence on seeking a military solution to conflicts, giving the 2012 rebels a logical indication of where success would be more likely.
The Tuareg insurgency in Mali has its roots in the colonial period. However, the insurgency worsened when Mali became independent in 1960. This insurgency was characterized by four main periods. The first rebellion came in 1963, the second rebellion in 1990, the third rebellion came in 1996, and the last one was in 2012, where the Tuaregs again attacked the Malian troops. This thesis argues that developmental policies and military engagement in the northern region were the most significant factors that contributed to the recurrence of the Tuareg insurgency in Mali. However, there are other minor factors, such as the economic difficulties, the emergence of drug trafficking, the weak governance, the decentralization, social collapse, and regional dynamics, that also contributed to the resurgence of the conflict. This thesis stresses that domestic management of the crisis played a more significant role than the external factors. It is crucial for the Mali government to establish secure borders and a secure internal environment in the northern region before instituting any developmental policies. For this reason, the Malian state needs a strong army to prevent malicious actors from entering the region and obstructing the objective of peace. Also, it needs to always pursue and sign realistic agreements.
Taking a global and multidisciplinary approach, The SAGE International Encyclopedia of Travel and Tourism examines the world travel and tourism industry, which is expected to grow at an annual rate of four percent for the next decade.
The SAGE Encyclopedia of World Poverty, Second Edition addresses the persistence of poverty across the globe while updating and expanding the landmark work, Encyclopedia of World Poverty, originally published in 2006 prior to the economic calamities of 2008. For instance, while continued high rates of income inequality might be unsurprising in developing countries such as Mexico, the Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) reported in May 2013 even countries with historically low levels of income inequality have experienced significant increases over the past decade, including Denmark, Sweden, and Germany. The U.N. and the World Bank also emphasize the persistent nature of the problem. It is not all bad news. In March 2013, the Guardian newspaper reported, "Some of the poorest people in the world are becoming significantly less poor, according to a groundbreaking academic study which has taken a new approach to measuring deprivation. The report, by Oxford University’s poverty and human development initiative, predicts that countries among the most impoverished in the world could see acute poverty eradicated within 20 years if they continue at present rates." On the other hand, the U.N. says environmental threats from climate change could push billions more into extreme poverty in coming decades. All of these points lead to the need for a revised, updated, and expanded edition of the Encyclopedia of World Poverty. Key Features: 775 evaluated and updated and 175 entirely new entries New Reader’s Guide categories Signed articles, with cross-references Further Readings will be accompanied by pedagogical elements Updated Chronology, Resource Guide, Glossary, and thorough new Index The SAGE Encyclopedia of World Poverty, Second Edition is a dependable source for students and researchers who are researching world poverty, making it a must-have reference for all academic libraries.
This report examines the prospects for stabilization in Mali following the political and military crisis that began in 2012. To this end, it examines Mali’s peace settlements since the early 1990s to identify flaws and successes. The report also explores whether Mali’s neighbor Niger owes its current stability to a more favorable context, shrewd policies, or sheer luck, and whether it might offer a model of resilience for Mali.
The 2011 WDR on Conflict, Security and Development underlines the devastating impact of persistent conflict on a country or region's development prospects - noting that the 1.5 billion people living in conflict-affected areas are twice as likely to be in poverty. Its goal is to contribute concrete, practical suggestions on conflict and fragility.
This book explains the structure and geographical and organisational mobility of criminal and migratory movements in the Sahara and the Sahel with a view to helping establish better development strategies for the region.
As in the cascading of water, violence and nonviolence can cascade down from commanding heights of power (as in waterfalls), up from powerless peripheries, and can undulate to spread horizontally (flowing from one space to another). As with containing water, conflict cannot be contained without asking crucial questions about which variables might cause it to cascade from the top-down, bottom up and from the middle-out. The book shows how violence cascades from state to state. Empirical research has shown that nations with a neighbor at war are more likely to have a civil war themselves (Sambanis 2001). More importantly in the analysis of this book, war cascades from hot spot to hot spot within and between states (Autesserre 2010, 2014). The key to understanding cascades of hot spots is in the interaction between local and macro cleavages and alliances (Kalyvas 2006). The analysis exposes the folly of asking single-level policy questions like do the benefits and costs of a regime change in Iraq justify an invasion? We must also ask what other violence might cascade from an invasion of Iraq? The cascades concept is widespread in the physical and biological sciences with cascades in geology, particle physics and the globalization of contagion. The past two decades has seen prominent and powerful applications of the cascades idea to the social sciences (Sunstein 1997; Gladwell 2000; Sikkink 2011). In his discussion of ethnic violence, James Rosenau (1990) stressed that the image of turbulence developed by mathematicians and physicists could provide an important basis for understanding the idea of bifurcation and related ideas of complexity, chaos, and turbulence in complex systems. He classified the bifurcated systems in contemporary world politics as the multicentric system and the statecentric system. Each of these affects the others in multiple ways, at multiple levels, and in ways that make events enormously hard to predict (Rosenau 1990, 2006). He replaced the idea of events with cascades to describe the event structures that 'gather momentum, stall, reverse course, and resume anew as their repercussions spread among whole systems and subsystems' (1990: 299). Through a detailed analysis of case studies in South Asia, that built on John Braithwaite's twenty-five year project Peacebuilding Compared, and coding of conflicts in different parts of the globe, we expand Rosenau's concept of global turbulence and images of cascades. In the cascades of violence in South Asia, we demonstrate how micro-events such as localized riots, land-grabbing, pervasive militarization and attempts to assassinate political leaders are linked to large scale macro-events of global politics. We argue in order to prevent future conflicts there is a need to understand the relationships between history, structures and agency; interest, values and politics; global and local factors and alliances.
Security in Africa: A Critical Approach to Western Indicators of Threat questions the dominant Western narrative of security threats in Africa. Based on an analysis traditional security studies and Western security policy, it argues that commonly used indicators are based on mainstream security studies and provide only circumscribed analyses of threats to international security. By assessing the origins of this traditional approach to security and problematizing failed states, political instability, Muslim populations, and poverty among others, it makes the case for a critical approach to framing security challenges in Africa.
