Weekly Update

In Niger, under cover of Covid-19 restrictions, journalists are imprisoned for doing their job. And France is accused of turning a blind eye.
Read more on Liberation

Guinée: faut-il supprimer les forces de défense et de sécurité?

Aliou Barry discusses the current security situation in Guinea, arguing that due to their behaviour, security and defence forces need to be replaced with an entire new structure.

Read more on WATHI

The COVID-19 Pandemic and Democracy in Sub-Saharan Africa

Elena Gadjanova argues that COVID-19 will accelerate processes of divergence and heterogeneity, impacting aspects such as democratization, civil society and media environments, electoral management institutions but also intra-African integration and cooperation.

Read more on Pandemipolitics

 

US-China Cooperation in Africa? Perhaps not in French Africa

This guest post by CARI Fellow Dr. Afa’anwi Ma’abo CHE, from Kampala International University, is the first of our series “Notes from the Field.” Over the coming weeks and months, we will publish a selection of posts from our current group of research fellows, with a focus on reflections, research notes and preliminary findings. For his CARI-funded research project, Dr. CHE traveled to Cameroon, which prompted the below thoughts.

Following China’s resolve to ‘go global’ at the end of the 20th century, Africa has witnessed a surge in Chinese trade, finance, and investments. China has risen and surpassed the US to become Africa’s leading economic partner. Cooperation, relative to competition, between the superpowers has a greater potential to induce optimal positive-sum gains for the superpowers and for Africa. But the scholarly and policy worlds are shrouded in pessimism about chances of the US cooperating with China in Africa. Three major reasons are often averred for the pessimism:

Read more on China-Africa Research Initiative

Sent by Edouard Bustin