ACAS Bulletin 77: North Africa and the Horn in the Vortex of the US War on Terror
Edited by Jesse Benjamin and Fouzi Slisli
This issue started as an attempt to explore the impacts of the US-declared global ‘War on Terror’ on the region of North Africa. We were joined at ACAS for this purpose by Fouzi Slisli as a special guest co-editor who brought considerable expertise of the region. We wanted to be clear that it was a US conceived war on terror, albeit with many ally and proxy nations drawn in, and we intended to focus on North Africa as a region because of its connections to the Arab and Islamic worlds that have been so much of the focus of this military engagement. The boundaries of North Africa versus the Middle East, and between North and Southern Africa, are themselves problematic and used here only loosely. Boundary issues are in fact indicative of colonial legacies that are themselves central to the story told in this issue. It is in this context that we received several interesting pieces on Somalia and the Horn of Africa, which are of course not in North Africa explicitly, but we decided to include them here because of the parallel dynamics they are experiencing in the new post-9/11 US global order. As such, this issue begins with two essays on Algeria, then moves to an update on Western Sahara and three pieces reflecting on Moroccan politics in the current context, and concludes with three essays on Somalia and the greater Horn of Africa. In each regional context, the new global milieu of post-Iraq invasion US global military projection is being felt in important new ways, while imperial politics as usual continues unabated, if generally intensifying. Read the rest of the introduction here.
Table of Contents
Introduction: North Africa and the Horn in the Vortex of the US War on Terror
Jesse Benjamin and Fouzi Slisli
The Algerian Civil War: Washington’s Model for ‘The New Middle-East’
Fouzi Slisli
How the ‘War on Terror’ Undermined Peace in Northwest Africa: The Western Sahara Conflict After 9/11
Jacob Mundy
US War on Terror: Reactions from Morocco’s Civil Society
James N. Sater
Political Islam in Morocco: The Case of the Party of Justice and Development (PJD)
Mohammed Hirchi
Meeting with Nadia Yassine: Non-Violent Islamists who Threaten the Regime in Morocco
Fouzi Slisli
In Pursuit of al-Qaeda in Somalia: A Critical Analysis of U.S. Foreign Policy Towards Somalia
Ramla Bile
Ethiopia Rides the Tiger
Immanuel Wallerstein
Winning Another Front in the War on Terror – What the West Could Do Better in Somalia
By Dustin Dehéz
