How Might the US Better Interact with Fragile and Conflict-Affected African States?

With the end of the second U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit and the release of the U.S.-Africa Partnership Framework in 2022, President Joe Biden's administration solidified its new approach to U.S.-Africa relations. Strategy Toward Sub-Saharan Africa and the Plan for Implementing the U.S. Strategy to stop fighting and promote peace. In both strategies and at the summit, the administration stressed the role of the United States in promoting peace and stability in fragile and conflict-torn African states.

The fact that the Biden administration has shown interest in Africa is good news, but now the focus should be on how the promises made will be carried out. Molly Phee, the assistant secretary for African affairs at the U.S. Department of State, says that a new strategy for the Sahel is being worked on by many different agencies. Under the Global Fragility Act, the United States also plans to move forward with reducing the risk of conflict in coastal West Africa. What did the United States do wrong in the past? What lessons should the U.S. use to keep fragile African countries from fighting and to make them safer in the future?

FLEXIBILITY IN COASTAL WEST AFRICA AND THE SAHEL

In response to the passage of the bipartisan Global Fragility Act of 2019, the U.S. Strategy to stop fighting and promote peace (also known as the Global Fragility Strategy, or GFS). As the White House said in April 2022, GFS implementation would be "a ten-year, evidence-based, whole-government effort to foster peace and long-term stability through integrated U.S. diplomacy, development, and security-sector engagement with the dual goals of strengthening national and regional peace, resilience, and stability and improving the way our government works." . . improve regional stability and keep people safe on the inside."

In fact, a lot of the countries that have been chosen to use the GFS are in Africa. On the continent, these are mostly in Libya, Mozambique, and what the US calls "Coastal West Africa," which is made up of Benin, Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, Guinea, and Togo. West Africa's coastal countries are facing new problems as the instability on their northern borders threatens to spread into their countries.

Senegal, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Burkina Faso, and Niger, which are in the Sahel region to the north, have a lot to do with the security and political situation of coastal West Africa (see map 1). Since the start of armed rebellions in the north of Mali and the military coup that ended two decades of civilian democratic rule, more than ten years have passed. As the conflict in Mali grew more complicated and violent Islamist groups, armed rebel movements, and criminal networks joined the fight, it spread to Mali's larger neighbours.