“The continent of Africa is under heavy pressures: economic, social, and political… In the Western Sahel, we find newly mint military administrations with secularist leanings who have ousted France and banned the United Nations, trying to form a new Confederation. Nigeria, the country with the highest Gross Domestic Product on the continent, is on the edge due to inflation and security challenges,” says Dr. Adam Mayer, Assistant Professor of International Relations and Security Studies at the American University of Iraq-Baghdad (AUIB). Against this backdrop, he explains, “the European Union tries to help with security sector reform in West Africa and the wider Sahel, strengthening the capacity of governments to successfully tackle security threats.”
Dr. Mayer co-authored an article on the issue, titled “Exporting security to Africa at its most volatile: the GAR-SI Sahel project and the role of Spain’s Guardia Civil in rebuilding Sahelian security,” in collaboration with researcher at the “General Gutiérrez Mellado University Institute” for security studies, Dr. Andrés de Castro, and others. The article was published in March 2024 by the Scopus Q1 international scientific journal, “African Identities.”
While the main focus of the article itself is on the military and security aspects of the Sahel region’s crises, Dr. Mayer elaborates on the broader political-economic picture: “The neoliberal African state is a hollow institution with very little in the vein of resources or capacities, but with many responsibilities, especially vis-à-vis the donor community, which enforces conditionalities” on indebted countries. He argues for “rebuilding state capacities before no-party military systems or one-party dictatorships overtake the entire continent as in the 1980s,” calling for “a new mentality in the West that understands that today, African nations again possess real foreign policy options, and that permanent austerity measures and the neoliberal hostility against the state and against industrial policy will no longer work.”
It is noteworthy here that Dr. Mayer had recently been appointed Guest Editor of a special issue of “African Identities,” titled “Military Marxism Re-Compradorised? The ’Post-Socialist’ African Polity and its Past.” The issue, still in the making, aims to explore and discuss the historical experience and prospects of Africa’s countries that, “in the 1960s-80s, had state socialist systems, people’s democracies, and radical states, often dominated by armed forces.”