External Influence, Failed States, Ungoverned Spaces and Small Arms Proliferation in Africa

Abstract

Across Africa, historical and contemporary geopolitical practices of coloniality have led to challenges of governance. Focusing mainly on “ungoverned spaces” and the related problems of SALWs proliferation across Sahel regions and Libya, this chapter argues that the complicity of global actors in creating such governance challenges is mostly obscured and, in most cases, encumbered by power-laden constructs that disempower African actors. The chapter therefore attempts to rethink ungoverned spaces in Africa beyond the tropes of orthodox geopolitical and strategic analysis. The chapter highlights the complicity of powerful global actors—mainly those who double as former colonial masters in Africa—in creating adverse geopolitical forms such as ungoverned spaces and arming them into threats to various levels of security—human, state, regional and global. Historically, we highlight how post-Berlin colonialism, and later the postcolonial state, created and enforced ungoverned spaces across Africa, utilising the use of arms as means of governance. Contemporarily, the chapter addresses how the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya, led mainly by the same old colonial powers, facilitated the spread of SALWs across the Sahel and into broader Sub-Saharan Africa and protracting pre-existing conflicts and creating new ones in the process. While local elements and actors are equally involved in the subsistence of ungoverned spaces and SALWs proliferation, the chapter maintains that bringing global actors to the centre of analysis does not only bring critical but important perspectives to the debate, it also promises the emancipatory and progressive element required for a comprehensive conception of the problem, hence a sustainable solution.