North-Africa Roundup

  • The 4th Congrès des études sur le Moyen-Orient et les Mondes Musulmans will be taking place online 28 June – 2 July, with panels including Islam and activism in North-West Africa, post-2011 sociopolitical upheavals through a gender lens, and language education and identities in Morocco and Algeria. Registration is free. More info here.
  • The Funambulist have made their back issues available, including two articles on the inter-related history of Algeria and Palestine. Building on her exhibition Discrete Violence: Architecture the French War in Algeria, Samia Henni discusses landscapes of colonial violence in Palestine and Algeria with Mostafa Minawi. In the second article, Lina Soualem relates how her encounter with Yannis Arab’s research on Palestine’s Algerians / Algeria’s Palestinians stroke a personal chord. Yannis Arab’s talk is available here.
  • The Arab Uprisings Project is a continually updated website with new resources, and event recordings made available monthly. This is a fantastic resources if you’re teaching or researching North Africa, or political engagement more widely.
  • Maghreb Maghrek‘s latest issue focuses on the Hirak and “street politics” in Algeria.

Jihadist violence putting ‘generation at risk’ in Africa’s Sahel: WFP

(Reuters) – Jihadist violence in Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso has forced nearly 1 million people to flee their homes, destroyed fragile agricultural economies and hobbled humanitarian aid efforts, the World Food Programme (WFP) said on Tuesday.

Groups with links to al Qaeda and Islamic State, once confined to lawless areas of northern Mali, have in recent years spread across the arid scrublands of the Sahel, to the south of the Sahara, into Burkina Faso and Niger, stoking local ethnic conflicts and attacking security forces wherever they go.

“The world does not yet fully grasp the extent of the mounting humanitarian crisis in the central Sahel region,” said WFP spokesman Herve Verhoosel. “If we do not act now to tackle hunger in the Sahel, a whole generation are at risk.

Read more on REUTERS