Structural Pressures and Political Instability: Trajectories for Sub-Saharan Africa

Sub-Saharan Africa has made important peace and security gains over the past two decades. Large-scale political violence has declined and fewer people are dying in wars. But other forms of political violence have increased, and the region’s future will still be turbulent.

Some countries are more at risk of instability and violent conflict, each with their own unique set of pressures and potential paths to instability. For example, entirely different factors drive the civil war in South Sudan, election violence in Kenya, the farmer-herder conflict in Nigeria’s Middle Belt, and armed conflict in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

This new Institute for Security Studies (ISS) report uses five distinct models from the International Futures forecasting system (IFs) to explore possible trajectories of political instability in sub-Saharan Africa until 2040.