Researchers working for the UN Development Programme (UNDP) interviewed more than 1,000 active or recent militants across eight countries in Africa in a pioneering study.
Their report – Journey to Extremism in Africa: Pathways to Recruitment and Disengagement – is one of the biggest anywhere on the motivations of militants. It comes against a background of increasing extremist violence across a swathe of the continent.
Though deaths worldwide from terrorism have declined over the past five years, attacks in sub-Saharan Africa have more than doubled since 2016, and in 2021 they comprised almost half of the global total.
The Sahel region has been particularly badly hit, with Islamic militancy fuelling acute political instability, but violent extremism has also spread or worsened in other parts of the continent, such as Mozambique and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Denne historien er fra February 17, 2023-utgaven av The Guardian Weekly.
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Denne historien er fra February 17, 2023-utgaven av The Guardian Weekly.
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Finn family murals
The optimism that runs through Finnish artist Tove Jansson's Moomin stories also appears in her public works, now on show in a Helsinki exhibition
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Lost Maya city revealed through laser mapping
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