“Africa’s transformation into “Glocal Terrorist Hub”: 3D Jihad between narco-terror, maritime piracy and sexual slavery”

Abstract

Transnational terrorism with a jihadist matrix has constantly fed on endogenous and exogenous factors so that the regional subsidiaries of Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State in Africa adapt to local realities, with repercussions that extend well beyond national geographical borders. In so doing, Africa has become a hub for terrorism, undergoing a process of trans-nationalization between the local and the global, with implications for regional security. It is against this backdrop that the study is framed, with a dual ‘bottom-up’ and ‘top-down’ analysis, examining the modus operandi of terrorist groups and their doctrinal underpinnings, which form a three-dimensional jihad involving narco-terrorism, maritime piracy, sexual slavery, and gender-based violence as a strategy of terror. Therefore, counter-terrorism policies in Africa, already based on hard measures, need to focus increasingly on soft mechanisms to prevent and counter radicalization and violent extremism, strengthened on the one hand by sustainable security architectures and on the other by integrated approaches to anti-terrorism cooperation at national, regional, and international levels.