The ongoing Boko Haram attacks in Northern Nigeria and the Al-Shabaab assault against the Westgate mall complex in Nairobi highlight the most pressing security issues in contemporary Africa.

The emergence and sustained presence of active Islamist insurgencies and Islamist-driven armed conflict and rebellions affects the length of the Afro-Arab cultural border zone that runs from Mauritania and Mali in the west to Somalia in the east.

While Africa is often known in the West for being a security-poor environment, the raft of attacks and the extent of violence across this stretch of the continent suggests a new phase in Africa’s interminable history of armed conflict.

For those hoping to do business in the region, which includes two of Africa’s major economies – Nigeria and Kenya – it’s important to understand the underlying dynamics driving regional instability.

Most of the countries in this zone have suffered from some form of Islamist political violence in recent years. What follows is a brief survey of the conflicts affecting each.

The Afro-Islamic Conflict Belt

Sahara and the Sahel – Mali, Chad, & Niger

A landlocked, mostly arid and semi-arid region located in Northwest Africa, Mali, Chad, and Niger have the sad distinction of being some of the poorest, least developed countries on the planet. Combined with their diverse mix of ethnic identities and tribal groups, these countries have long had problems preserving constitutional democracy and have suffered from military coups, regional rebellions, and foreign interference in their internal politics

A recent example of this volatile mix can be seen in the current bout of violence in Mali, which sparked off in 2012 when an ethnic Taureg rebellion in Northern Mali took advantage of the chaos caused by a military coup in the capital and weapons and fighters flowing into Mali from the civil war in neighboring Libya to seize control of all of northern Mali.

Taureg rebels were successfully challenged by Islamist fighters in several key towns across the rebel-occupied north, which prompted a U.N. and ECOWAS-backed French military intervention in January to push out the Islamists. Since then, though the pace of French military operations has eased and the Islamist fighters have retreated into the countryside, a low-level guerrilla war against both the Malian government and supporting French military units has broken out and looks to continue on indefinitely.

Of the loosely organized Islamist fighters presently opposing the Malian government and the French, one connected to the larger Al-Qaeda network – Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) – has shown the ability to conduct large-scale, cross-border operations. In mid-January, a group of fighters crossed the border into Algeria to seize the Tigantourine gas facility near In Amenas, Algeria and held more than 800 people hostage  for four days, including many westerners, until Algerian special-forces units attacked the fighters and freed the hostages.

More broadly, the violence in Mali is part of a larger conflict across the Arab Maghreb and the Western Sahel that has pitted small bands of Islamist fighters against governments in a number of states in the region since the end of the Algerian civil war in 2002.

While mostly consisting of “low-intensity” conflict – bombings, small-scale firefights, assassinations, and the like – the Sahel’s weak and often squabbling governments, grinding poverty, hash geography, nomadic peoples, and wide-open, porous borders has made it all but impossible for local governments to hunt down and destroy these groups.

Nigeria   

Directly south of the Western Sahel, Nigeria’s predominantly Muslim north has been beset since 2001 with a simmering sectarian revolt, led by northern Islamist militants, against domination by the wealthier, Christian south.

This basic sectarian divide between the Muslim north and the Christian south is a perennial source of instability and conflict in Nigeria and has led to outbreaks of violence and suspension of democratic, civilian rule via military coup several times in Nigeria’s history since independence.

However, the latest episodes of violence differ from previous ones due to the role played by organized militants operating in the country’s north. Boko Haram  insurgents – the name loosely translates into English as “western learning is forbidden” – have conducted a string of bombings, assassinations, and massacres against government and civilian targets throughout the north and north-central parts of the country.

Whereas previous Muslim-Christian political conflict in Nigeria was led by northern Muslim elites trying to maintain control over the much richer Muslim south via control of the central government – and thus took on much more of an ethnic squabble over control of resources than a religious war – the current Islamist insurgency in the north is not directed by traditional elites and has actively targeted them due to their continuing loyalty to the central state.

Given the tactics of Boko Haram, its apparent grass-roots support and the revolutionary aims of its religious goals – not even the imposition of Sharia law in much of the north has placated them –Boko Haram looks much more like the fundamentalist rebels battled by Algeria during that country’s civil war or the first generation of Taliban fighters that seized control of Afghanistan in the late 1990s than the typical ethnic militiaman found in most African rebel movements.

Unlike the Islamist fighters in the Western Sahel and the Arab Maghreb, however, there are no known connections between Boko Haram and the larger transnational Al-Qaeda network, though such linkages cannot be ruled out in the future as the rebellion develops.

Sudan    

Just to the east of the Western Sahel is Sudan, an officially Islamist government ruled by indicted war criminal Omar al Bashir. He ruled as an authoritarian since 1989, when a military coup installed his political party into power and effectively ended northern Sudan’s short-lived experiment in electoral democracy. The country was officially split in two in 2011 as a result of the peace accords ending the Second Sudanese Civil War. Sudan became a single-party, authoritarian Islamist state in 1993 when Bashir, now president, reordered the constitution along formally Islamist lines.

Bashir and his regime pursued an increasingly gruesome, though ultimately unsuccessful military campaign to put down the rebellion in the country’s south. The area, primarily comprised of black Christian people, had been attached to the Arab Muslim north since independence from Britain in 1955. This great mistake of European colonialism in turn led to two civil wars briefly separated by a failed episode of democratic federalism that only ended in 2005 with partition of the country into north and south, culminating in an independent South Sudan in 2011.

This, however, did not end hostilities either within the remnant rumps of Northern Sudan or between the now independent south and the rump north. In Northern Sudan, as the civil war in the south was coming to an end in 2003, an ethnic rebellion by the natives of the Darfur region revolted against the regime led by Bashir in Khartoum. While there was no religious cause of the conflict – Darfurians, like other North Sudanese, are Sunni Muslims – there was a distinct racial component as the black Darfurians resented being ruled by Khartoum-based Arabs. In response to this new rebellion, Bashir unleashed a genocidal, scorched-earth campaign against the people in Darfur – a program of wanton government-backed rape, pillage, and murder that has to date killed nearly 3 million people and made refugees of at least a half-million more.

To the south, official partition and independence created a new problem as now-independent South Sudan held most of the formerly unified country’s oil wealth while the north controlled the facilities through which that oil was exported to world markets. Disputes over oil revenue and lingering territorial issues over control of strategic, economically important border territories rich in oil have set the stage for a new war, this time an inter-state rather than a civil war, between Sudan and now independent South Sudan.

Finally, the conflict in Sudan’s Darfur region has bled over into neighboring Chad as refugees and rebels from Darfur, which abuts Chad’s eastern border, have used Chadian territory as both a refuge and a base area from which to stage attacks on forces inside Darfur that remain loyal to Khartoum. In turn, this has led to the Bashir government targeting Chad for destabilization in a tit-for-tat fashion.

The Horn and East Africa: Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Yemen

Lastly, at the far eastern end of continent lies the snakes’ nest of rebellions and inter-state rivalries in the Horn of Africa – a highly strategic region that abuts the trade routes of the Red and Arabian Sea, but also abuts the oil-rich Arab Peninsula. It is here in the 1990s that Al-Qaeda first manifested its presence and where today the U.S. is most openly fighting Islamist militants outside of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Kenya, site of the gruesome Westgate attack that killed so many in Nairobi in September, along with Tanzania, were early targets of Islamist militants. Both, for instance, were targeted by Al-Qaeda in 1998 when the organization – fresh from its declaration of war against the U.S. – attacked the U.S. embassies in each. Since then and following the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, two Al-Qaeda-linked organizations have emerged.

The first, Al-Shabaab – the organization which carried out the Westgate attacks – is the successor organization to the Somali Islamic Courts Union, a movement which emerged out of the collapse of the Somali state in the 1990s and which took over the formerly unified nation’s capital of Mogadishu along with much of Southern Somalia. The ICU’s success, very similar to that of the Afghan Taliban, was in part due to assistance received from Eritrea – the principal military antagonist of Ethiopia.

Subsequent to the 9/11 attacks, the ICU was targeted by the U.S. for elimination. Washington supported an Ethiopian invasion of Somalia – which Ethiopia increasingly viewed as a base for its Eritrean enemies, and soon Ethiopian troops invaded and dislodged the ICU from its territory in the Somali South. A Western-backed provisional government was then installed and Ethiopia, having achieved its aims and not willing to be sucked into a growing Islamist insurgency, withdrew it forces in 2009

While successful in destroying the ICU, the Ethiopian invasion ultimately caused the movement to disintegrate into smaller, more radical organizations like Al-Shabaab, which in turn began engaging in guerilla operations against the Somali provisional government and its Ethiopian backers. Since then, Somalia has been riven by conflict between an African Union, U.S., Ethiopian, and Kenyan-supported provisional government and the radical offshoots of the defeated ICU, which has pledged revenge on the outsiders it sees as meddling in Somalia’s internal affairs.

Finally, across the Gulf of Aden in nearby Yemen, a widespread Islamic rebellion against the Yemeni state has been intermittently flaring since the late 1990s, with the recent events of the Arab Spring only throwing fuel on the fire. Al-Qaeda, too, has been operating in Yemen for many years with the most well-known Al-Qaeda operation in the country being the attack against the U.S.S. Cole in October 2000, which preceded the Al-Qaeda attacks against Washington and New York by a year.

When Al-Qaeda central was eventually eliminated from Afghanistan by U.S. forces in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQIP) emerged as the most potent regional branch of the larger organization. Because of this development, the U.S. – based across the Red Sea in Djibouti – has been carrying out ongoing anti-Islamist operations throughout the Horn of Africa, including an anti-Al-Qaeda drone-bombing campaign in Yemen carried out with the connivance of the Yemeni government.

Analysis: Africa’s Latin America   

Across the whole northern top of Sub-Sahara Africa there is a large swath of territory currently experiencing widespread armed conflict due to the radicalization of Islamist groups and communities. While it should be noted that there is no overarching control of these movements and rebellions by any central organization, there nonetheless remains a cross-border ideological similarity between them that should be a cause for concern for those western businessmen and women who choose to do business there.

In many respects the Islamist rebellions against governments in the region look very similar to the leftist revolts and civil wars that struck much of Latin American, particularly Central America, during the Cold War. There, as in Africa, the combination of weak, perennially corrupt governments, grinding poverty and economic underdevelopment, foreign meddling, and simmering ethnic and class-based tensions created the context for revolt. Also as in Latin America, armed revolt led to adoption of terrorism, guerrilla war, and the targeting and demonization of western citizens, governments, firms, and institutions.

It took, however, a larger, transnational political movement like Marxist-Leninism in Latin America or Islamism in Northern Sub-Saharan Africa to turn these accumulated local grievances into fuel for something more combustible than isolated acts of rebellion against a particular government. The ideology in effect created a wellspring of popular support among the region’s downtrodden and a network of supporters in neighboring countries that allowed militants and activists in one country to support and provide shelter to militants and activists in another – sometimes substantial support when an actual state – such as Sudan, or in the case of Latin America Cuba and Nicaragua, is captured by the movement.

Only in Africa the far-less developed economies and people of northern sub-Saharan Africa proved to be much more conducive to an ideology based on local religion – militant Islam – than was the case in the more developed and culturally modern Latin America. There, Catholic-orientated liberation theology played only a weak second fiddle to traditional Marxism and Marxist-flavored nationalism. In fact, the religious establishment in Latin America, with rare exceptions, overwhelmingly supported the domestic status quo and the conservative elites who ran it as both were ardently pro-Catholic.

In Islamic Sub-Saharan Africa, the opposite has more or less occurred since Islamists themselves are often not formally in control of the countries they reside in – meaning non-radical Islamic preachers can often be outflanked on the right by radicals who use themes of oppression at the hands of foreigners, non-Muslims, and Muslim apostates – often fellow Muslims who simply disagree with the tactics of the militants – in order to accrue political legitimacy.

Going forward, if the Latin American experience with a militant left during the twilight years of the Cold War is a fair analogy for understanding what is taking place along the northern rim of Sub-Saharan Africa today, one should neither expect these insurgencies to end quickly nor for the larger expression of Islamic identity they ultimately represent to fade into the background when and if they are defeated militarily.

Much as the revolt of the left in Latin America represented a wider awakening of working and middle-class Latin Americans to the politically-driven social inequities found in their respective countries. Islamism today represents a similar political awakening by formerly quiet religious communities only nominally tied to their states via domination by local, corrupt elites as to the need for wider political inclusion and corresponding access to resources in their respective countries.

The conclusion is that unless these demands for inclusion and resources are credibly met either through democratization, power sharing, and a sustained commitment to development, these movements and the communities they represent will not be satisfied.

That being the case, armed revolt and the resulting carving out of autonomous zones within or independencet from the region’s existing states will continue to be the primary aim of these movements – however unlikely their success is.

Jeffrey Cavanaugh holds a Ph.D in political science with a specialization in international relations from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Formerly an assistant professor of political science and public administration at Mississippi State University, he writes on global affairs and international economics for AFK Insider, Mint Press News and BAM South.