The Way I See it

For the UN, the Mali deployment has been politically one of its most important to date, one of its largest in terms of numbers of deployed personnel, and one of its most deadly in terms of personnel losses. At the time of writing, MINUSMA also appears to have been one of the least successful. Overall, implementation of the peace agreement has been slow, uneven and flawed. The ongoing violence has made it difficult for armed groups to withdraw from certain areas, let alone dis

Background In the 1990s, Mali was often put forward as a model of African democracy. It is not hard to understand why. Following an extended period of authoritarian rule after becoming independent in 1960, Mali held three elections as of 1992 in which power passed to the winner. An anomaly among the Sahelian states during that decade, it remains so in several other corners of the African continent two decades on. But in fact, Mali has more in common with its fellow Sahelian s

This third blog on the situation in the Middle East discusses the proposition to create a Sunni state in parts of Syria and Iraq. On 25 November 2015, John Bolton, US representative to the UN from 2005–2006, neo-con par excellence, published a piece in the New York Times that advocated the creation of a Sunni state in those areas presently occupied by the Islamic State. There is very little that Mr. Bolton and I share politically but on the issue of the future of this region,

This blog was first published on the website of the Centre for Security Governance on 10 January 2014 Is South Sudan going south? Not necessarily, but the world’s youngest state is clearly in big trouble. In the fall of 2008 I was briefly posted in Juba, what was then the future capital of South Sudan. My assignment was to train the future trainers of the South Sudan Army for their role in supporting the transition from an army of national liberation to an army under democrat

The Central African Republic (CAR) has been much in the news recently as the security situation has collapsed and gone from bad to worse. It was not supposed to be so. In 2008, several key international development players decided to launch a major effort to reform CAR’s security sector. This was billed as the most comprehensive and integrated reform effort ever carried out in the national security environment.The reforms were acutely necessary. Since 1960, when it became ind