Africa Has Entered a New Era of Warfare

Surge in fighting is largely unnoticed amid conflicts in Ukraine, Middle East

- GabrieleSteinhauser, Andrew Barnett and Emma Brown

An unprecedented explosion of conflicts has carved a trail of death and destruction across the breadth of Africa from Mali near the continent's western edge all the way to Somalia on its eastern Horn.

Older wars, such as the Islamist uprisings in northern Nigeria and Somalia and the militia warfare in eastern Congo, have intensified dramatically. New power contests between militarized elites in Ethiopia and Sudan are convulsing two of Africa's largest and most populous nations.

The countries of the western Sahel-a semiarid region south of the Sahara-are now the heart of global jihadism, where regional offshoots of al Qaeda and Islamic State are battling both each other and a group of wobbly military governments.

This corridor of conflict stretches across approximately 4,000 miles and encompasses about 10% of the total land mass of sub-Saharan Africa, an area that has doubled in just three years and today is about 10 times the size of the U.K., according to an analysis by Verisk Maplecroft, a consulting firm specializing in political risk. In its wake lies incalculable human suffering-mass displacement, atrocities against civilians and extreme hunger-on a continent that is already by far the poorest on the planet.

Yet these extraordinary geopolitical shifts in sub-Saharan Africa have been overshadowed by higher-profile conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East. That has led to less attention from global policy makers-especially in the West-grossly underfunded humanitarian-aid programs and fundamental questions over the futures of hundreds of millions of people.

Dramatic surge