Conflict & Resilience Monitor – 30 June 2024

The topic de jour with nearly every conversation is about Climate Change. This is reminiscent of the early 2010s when social media empowered much of the violent extremist recruitment and then digital posts left law enforcement with evidence regarding the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and its brief kinetic advance to create a caliphate. Much effort was used to address responsible understanding of these complexities. Similar concerns carry over from the 2010s on how to address the climate change and security nexus. Against this backdrop, the interplay between terrorism, organised crime, and climate change—and specifically how they appear to be fuelling violent extremist engagement—warrants our full attention.

This year, Zimbabwe experienced its worst drought in decades, affecting more than 80 percent of its population and leading to a declaration of a state of national disaster by the President. With climate impacts becoming more frequent and pervasive, risks to social cohesion, resilience, stability, and peace are on the rise, reshaping the country’s security and development landscape and making it more complex. Critical questions thus arise concerning what can be done and who would be best positioned to drive responses. There are no fixed answers to this, but recent developments in the national climate change policy architecture can open a window of opportunity for integrating elements of conflict-sensitivity and peacebuilding. This approach cannot be pursued by the Ministry of Environment, Climate Change and Wildlife alone; instead, it requires multi-stakeholder collaboration where all the concerned humanitarian, development, and peace sector actors play a role based on their respective expertise, skills and mandates.

Having earned only 40% of the vote in the most pivotal election since the dawn of South Africa’s democracy in 1994, a subdued African National Congress (ANC) scrambled to find partners to form a government. It was faced with the option of striking a deal with the Democratic Alliance (DA), of John Steenhuisen, which got 22% of the vote, or the parties that broke away from it, namely the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) of Julius Malema, which won 10%, and former President Jacob Zuma’s uMkhonto weSizwe Party (MKP), which received 15%.

In recent years the African continent, particularly West and Central Africa, has been experiencing an upsurge of coups and undemocratic means of seizing power. Namely Mali in August 2020, Chad in April 2021, Guinea in September 2021, Burkina Faso in January 2022, Niger in July 2023 and Gabon in August 2023. The idiosyncrasies surrounding these coups have sparked debate in the academic arena, as researchers seek to understand the logic and drive behind the upsurge. The pattern of these coups suggests the possibility of a coup contagion, something Singh rebukes. Singh argues that there is no evidence of a contagious wave, but rather what is being witnessed is a contemporaneous effect of previously coup-prone states in West and Central Africa. Asadu argues that the popular support received by many of these coups indicate plagued political systems, stagnant economic growth, and deteriorated standards of living, but more significantly failing democracies and a collapsed rule of law in many of these African states. As these democracies fail to bring forth change, numerous African states have succumbed to the forceful removal of presidents and seizure of power. This piece seeks to focus on coup leaders and their military force, their psychological framing, cognitive bias, and how they choose to respond to what they perceive as a risk. In this regard, risk will be defined as the loss of sovereignty within the coup circle.