Tracing the Islamic State’s origins from the Middle East, this article seeks to understand the group’s expansion and rise on the African continent, as well as why local militant groups have joined its black banner. In an effort to minimise this terrorist scourge, the article seeks to examine its modus operandi within the African context, explore contemporary counterterrorism approaches, and propose alternative counterterrorism strategies in an effort to eliminate the threat posed by the Islamic State to Africa and its peoples.

Boko Haram has been in existence since 2002. In its more than two decades, it has been the scourge of the region bringing death, destruction and displacement to vast swathes of Nigeria and neighbouring states. Despite strenuous efforts on the part of the Nigerian state, neighbouring countries and the international community, the carnage and breadth of human suffering have grown in intensity as Boko Haram and its offshoots have continued to extend their tentacles into new territories. Despite intense rivalries between Boko Haram and its Islamist rivals, and counter-terrorism efforts, the extremist challenge posed has escalated. Why is this so? Three factors contributed to this failure. First, the research on which this article is based, found that the phenomenon of Boko Haram needs to be understood beyond the borders of Nigeria – as part of a dynamic regional security complex. Second, because analysts under-played the importance of Islamist ideology, the nature of the beast was misunderstood. Policy measures undertaken, based on this misdiagnosis, were then bound to fail. Third, counter-terrorism efforts have also failed due to an important omission – failing to see the relationship between misogyny and extremism.

Much has been written on Africa's myriad security challenges. Whilst these challenges may overlap in extant literature, they are often treated in isolation from each other. Adopting a different approach, this book views these challenges not as distinct entities but as outcomes of the evolving Anthropocene Age. In order to connect these different security challenges confronting this vast continent and its people, we adopt a broader approach to security than traditional concerns of conventional war. This wider human security framework views issues of climate change, poverty, and population growth with concerns equal to that of an enemy armed force invading one's territory or the risk of terrorism. It is only by adopting this wider security lens that one can fully appreciate how humanity interacts with nature and how nature impacts on issues as diverse as governance, poverty or conflict.

As any first-year political science student would attest, a state may be defined as a community residing in a particular geographical space with institutions that regulate its affairs and the necessary coercive means to protect its independence against other states, while judiciously utilizing such coercive means as a deterrent to wayward members of its own community. This independence is often described as the sovereignty of states, which is both negative and positive. While negative sovereignty is merely de jure in that it is a formal legal condition, providing for some recognition in international relations as well as nominal non-interference in one's domestic affairs, positive sovereignty is not merely de jure but de facto where states actively fulfill their citizens' needs and aspirations. African states are often weak, due in part to anthropogenic pressures, and so operate merely at the level of negative sovereignty. In the Anthropocene Age, where the human impact on the world has led to rising insecurity across the globe, postindependent African political elites have failed to create inclusive communities in their polities and have, instead, directed the coercive apparatus of states toward citizens in an effort to bolster regime security. Meanwhile, the continental African security architecture represented by the African Union reinforces regime security at the expense of the human security of ordinary citizens. This chapter argues that, given the fact that the state is often at the heart of insecurity, the African Union needs to adopt a less state-centric security architecture if positive security and sovereignty are to be realized.

The Muslim world is in crisis – politically, socially and economically – and Islam is in need of a reformation. Drawing on insights from the Protestant Reformation, this article argues that two of the major reasons for the success of the Protestant Reformation lay in the fact that dissident voices such as that of Martin Luther were protected and that developments like the printing press increased literacy thereby empowering ordinary people to read the Bible on their own without the Church serving as a mediator in conveying revelation to the masses. This helped to break the monopoly of the Catholic Church. At the same time, the printing press allowed the views of reformers to be disseminated to a wider audience creating widespread sympathies for the reformers given the excesses of the Church. Whilst the Muslim world shares many objective realities of the period leading to Europe’s Reformation, the reality is that reformers are provided with little protection from Muslim political elites and widespread illiteracy prevents reformist ideas from gaining traction to a wider audience.

Africa's numerous security challenges, from weak governance to poor civil–military relations and economic backwardness and war, have demonstrated that the continent's obsession with traditional conceptions of sovereignty and maintaining its own rendition of the Westphalian system is woefully inadequate for the task of securing 1.2 billion Africans. These security challenges are exacerbated by climate change. Issues of desertification know no respect for the integrity of states. What is required is more inclusive and holistic concepts of security and greater powers surrendered to the African Union on the part of nation-states.

By the end of the twentieth century, the realm of international relations was characterized by resource geopolitics (i.e., the potential for conflict as a result of the scarcity of vital resources across political boundaries). The idea presented by early scholars regarding the link between the environment and conflict was speculative and imprecise, hence the need for a theory that addresses this link. The hypothesis behind the environmental scarcity theory is that "resource scarcity, through the three causal forms of scarcity (i.e., demand-induced, supply-induced, and structural-induced scarcity), has the potential to cause conflict." In the age of the Anthropocene, environmental scarcity, and therefore conflict, is increasingly coming to the fore. This chapter argues that due to population growth and degradation and depletion of the Nile, along with its uneven distribution, fierce competition over the already finite water resource increases the potential for an inter-riparian conflict in the Nile Basin. Understanding the link between the two variables—environmental scarcity (independent variable) and violence (dependent variable)—requires an analysis of the effects and nature of environmental scarcity.

Authoritarianism and its corollary–the democratic deficit across the region–are intimately connected to the broader politics of exclusion and patriarchy. This chapter explores the issues of patriarchy and how these intersect with authoritarianism and the dearth of democracy in two country case studies—Iran and Saudi Arabia—two large and influential regional countries representing predominantly Shia and Sunni societies, respectively. Under public patriarchy, power is distributed amongst all patriarchs according to whatever other principles of stratification operate. Thus, women do not have access to society’s most important institutions since men hold all the power in those institutions. This leads to the notion that it is a “boys club” and women are excluded from the club. Under the governing system in the Islamic Republic of Iran, women are confronted with a systematic and widespread legal discrimination. The 2011 mass social protests for democratisation and justice in the MENA region led to increased prospects for female mobilisation.