In June 2021 France announced a drawdown of the 5000 Operation Barkhane troops in Mali, to be replaced by the European multinational Task Force Takuba, which was established in 2020. Security forces countering these armed groups included national, regional and international forces, as well as local self-defence groups. There was no substantive progress in any of the region’s peace processes in 2021, although sub-Saharan African states continued to host more multilateral peace operations (22) than any other region of the world.īurkina Faso, Mali, Niger and Nigeria were West Africa’s hotspots of insecurity in 2021, mainly due to attacks by armed groups, with some operating across national borders. There were four successful military coups (in Chad, Guinea, Mali and Sudan) and three failed coups (in CAR, Niger and Sudan), compared with just one coup in the region in 2020 (in Mali). Security dilemmas in sub-Saharan Africa in 2021 were also shaped by the presence of armed groups and criminal networks, election-related violence, and water insecurity and the growing impact of climate change.

Conflict dynamics and ethnic and religious tensions were often rooted in a combination of state weakness, corruption, ineffective delivery of basic services, competition over natural resources, inequality and a sense of marginalization. Eleven of these 18 states suffered higher estimated conflict-related fatalities in 2021 than in 2020, with the total increase for the region standing at about 19 per cent.Īlmost all the armed conflicts were internationalized due to the involvement of external state actors and/or the trans-national activities of armed groups and criminal networks. Low-intensity, subnational armed conflicts occurred in 6 states: Benin, Burundi, Chad, Kenya, Madagascar and Uganda. High-intensity armed conflicts occurred in 12 states: Burkina Faso, Cameroon, the Central African Republic (CAR), the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Ethiopia, Mali, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan and Sudan. There were at least 18 states (out of a total of 49) in sub-Saharan Africa with active armed conflicts in 2021.

Armed conflict in central africa region