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There’s a lot going on in the world right now, but if anyone’s interested in reading about the historical origins of the Islamist insurgencies in DRC and Mozambique, I have a piece on this in the latest edition of Current Trends in Islamist Ideology https://www.hudson.org/research/16471-the-central-african-jihad-islamism-and-nation-building-in-mozambique-and-uganda
2/ I argue that we need to examine the politics of African liberation movements to understand these insurgencies’ origins. For a mixture of ideological and practical reasons, the Ugandan and Mozambican post-liberation regimes sought to repress and/or coopt Muslim populations…
3/ In ways that alienated elements of those communities. I don’t purport to offer a monocausal explanation of these insurgencies, which are very complex and hardly identical (and still poorly understood, particularly Mozambique’s ASWJ/”al Shabaab”). But I argue that…
4/ We should consider the insurgencies as byproducts, in part, of the inability of the Ugandan and Mozambican regimes to translate their liberation struggles into nation-building projects that fully encompass their respective Muslim minorities
5/ One last point: I only discuss the vague relationship w/ ISIS briefly (& w/ some skepticism). But I’d add that the ADF’s recent prison break in Beni (which occurred after I’d submitted the paper) is an interesting data point as @Weissenberg7 writes: https://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2020/10/islamic-state-links-prison-break-in-drc-to-speech-from-its-spokesman.php
