Militancy and violence in West Africa : reflecting on radicalisation, comparing contexts and evaluating effectiveness of preventive policies

Abstract

By 2000, ‘radicalisation’ had become a major global issue. Although ‘9/11’ was still a year away, the American Embassies in East Africa had been bombed in 1998 and violent conflicts simmered in many parts of the world. At just about the same time, bitter civil wars, resource-centred conflicts and intraethnic strife raged in West Africa. Against the background of research being undertaken at King’s College London, 1. the mutually reinforcing links between ‘radicalisation’ and ‘violence’ (potentially sensitive terms, discussed below) in West Africa became clearly obvious and a successful application to investigate this was submitted to the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). 2. This Special Issue contains articles emerging from that work, with a set of country studies complemented by overarching synthetic analysis.