Francesco Strazzari

Borders Ending Nowhere: The Geopolitical Imaginaries and Practices of Russia’s Spheres of Interest in Africa

Russia has been involved in Africa since Tsarist times, but its involvement has ebbed and flowed. Nonetheless, the idea of Africa as an open political landscape in which Russia could act as a great power has been relatively persistent, often in connection with the domestic resurfacing of civilisational discourses on Russian exceptionalism. Recently, there has been much concern in the West about the expansion of Russian projection in Africa, with some suggesting that Moscow is establishing a sphere of influence. Our analysis of Russia’s geopolitical imagination and its subsequent practices does not lead us to conclude that a deliberate attempt to establish a genuine sphere of influence is underway. Instead, we see an opportunistic endeavour to assert and shape a geographically continuous sphere of interest (Russian: sfera interesov), negotiating with local partners forms of collaboration that reflect and prompt change in the international system.

Policy brief summarizing lessons learnt on the EU’s measures to prevent violent extremism in the region

How do EU initiatives that are geared to help prevent and counter violent extremism in North Africa and the Sahel match the underlying drivers of radicalisation? This PREVEX Policy Brief offers a reading of EU strategies in the backlight of our findings, which stem from fieldwork that was conducted in cases of both occurrence and non-occurrence of violent extremist escalation across North Africa and the Sahel. As scholarly literature lays emphasis on how phenomena such as violent extremism are highly context-dependent, it is crucial to understand regional and local dynamics of social change and intermediation. This brief therefore provides an overall assessment of EU P/CVE policies and projects in North Africa and the Sahel, focusing on key contextual policy issues: democratic governance, rule of law, education, gender, reintegration. It argues that EU’s emphasis on rule of law is particularly appropriate, while there is room for greater engagement in the fields of education and reintegration – provided that conflict-sensitive lenses are carefully applied. In the fields of democratic governance and gender, instead, a mismatch between general strategies and on-the-ground implementation can be observed. Targeted research in these critical areas of intervention and assistance is highly needed. Overall, our analysis invites to consider radicalisation processes not as social pathology but as ongoing social phenomena that take place in a space where several actors rival for material and ideational resources, and therefore require careful assessment and multi-scalar prioritisation, including at the regional and transnational level.

Governance, fragility and insurgency in the Sahel: a hybrid order in the making

Once a region that rarely featured in debates about global security, the Sahel has become increasingly topical as it confronts the international community with intertwined challenges related to climate variability, poverty, food insecurity, population displacement, transnational crime, contested statehood and jihadist insurgencies. This Special Issue discerns the contours of political orders in the making. After situating the Sahel region in time and space, we focus on the trajectory of regional security dynamics over the past decade, which are marked by two military coups in Mali (2012 and 2020). In addressing state fragility and societal resilience in the context of increasing external intervention and growing international rivalry, we seek to consider broader and deeper transformations that can be neither ignored nor patched up through the framework of the ‘war on terror’ projected onto ‘ungoverned spaces’. Focusing especially on the mobilisation of material and immaterial resources, we apply political economy lenses in combination with a historical sociological approach to shed light on how extra-legal governance plays a crucial role in the deformation, transformation and reformation of political orders.

Working paper on implementation of EU crisis response in Libya

Terrore Sovrano. Stato e Jihad nell'Era Post-Liberale

How the EU is facing crises in its neighbourhood: Evidence from Libya and Ukraine