New grant to study the Sahel crisis
Dr Ed
Stoddard, Dr Melita Lazell and Prof Tony Chafer of the Centre for European and
International Studies Research have just been awarded £50,000 by the British
Academy for a research project on 'The Sahel Crisis in Historical Perspective:
Supporting a Conflict-Sensitive Approach through Interdisciplinary Research'
under the UK's Global Challenges Research Fund scheme.
This new project
emerges out of a Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences-funded Strategic
Research Project 'Assessing the shifting
character of contemporary intervention in West Africa', undertaken through
the West Africa Peace and Security Network, which has generated over £400,000
in external funding to date.
Security in
the Sahel is a growing priority for UK foreign policy. In the West African Sahel, the activities of armed
groups, either described as 'jihadist' or themselves laying claim to 'jihad',
have increased in recent years, severely limiting possibilities for economic
development. The crisis
has been causing violence, violations of human rights and displacement,
affecting over 5 million people in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger. In 2018 the
British army deployed to Mali in support of the French counter-terrorist
operation and, this month, it also deployed in support of the UN peacekeeping
mission in the country. However, current
responses lack conflict sensitivity, are overly militaristic and have worsened
the situation for civilians. There is widespread recognition that alternative
approaches are required, but cross-regional, historically nuanced
understandings of the specific drivers of violence, on which new policy could
be built, are underdeveloped.
Members of
the research group have been increasingly solicited by UK policymakers in the Foreign,
Commonwealth and Development Office and Ministry of Defence for their insights
into the situation. Tony Chafer recently appeared before the House of Lords
International Relations Committee with the report 'The UK and Sub-Saharan Africa: prosperity, peace and development
co-operation'. This has also led to a series of events organised jointly
with Chatham House in London on security in the Sahel.
The research group's work has also led to the signing of a
Memorandum of Understanding with the University of Ibadan, Nigeria's leading
university. The partnership has already led to three conferences in
collaboration with Ibadan; Tony Chafer and Ed Stoddard have been appointed
Fellows of the Society for Peace Studies and Practice based at Ibadan, and
further collaborative research projects are also planned.
It is the
latest in a series of funding successes for the research group. Dr Ed Stoddard recently
completed a two-year Marie Curie Research Fellowship at the Scuola Superiore
Sant’Anna in Pisa, where he conducted a project entitled ‘Non-Western Powers and the Changing Character of Warfare’ (EUR
180,000). Prof Tony Chafer, with Prof Gordon Cumming (Cardiff University), was
a collaborator on a £74,000 Leverhulme major research project 'Mobilising Support for
Militaro-Humanitarian Intervention: Beyond Two-Level Games'. He won £71,000
for a Leverhulme postdoctoral Research Fellow, Dr Elise Lopez Lucia, for a
project on 'Transforming Regionalism:
Security Politics and the "Remaking" of West Africa' and has
recently won £81,000 through the South Coast Doctoral Training Partnership for
a postdoctoral Research Fellow to work on a project 'English-speaking North Africa? English, security and postcolonial
competition'.