Security threats, conflicts and rivalries in the northern and sahelian Africa contributed to and are affected by symbiotic centrifugal and centripetal forces that lead to both increasing fragmentation and periodic corralling towards unified action. In March 2017, Jihadi groups affiliated with Al Qaeda merged, creating what was supposed to become a new powerful organization: The Group to Support Islam and Muslims (GSIM). The goal was to fulfill the wishes of Al Qaeda leadership with the clear intention of stepping up attacks in the region, following the creation of a French -led regional organization, known as the G 5 Sahel. The creation of GSIM occurred in the context of the weakening of the Islamic State in the Middle East and North Africa; the serious Iraqi and Syrian degradations directly affected IS (Daesch) affiliates in the Sahel, namely the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara (ISGS), the main competitor of GSIM. Since late 2017, and with the total collapse of IS, there have been recurring rumors of the establishment of a new alliance between the GSIM and the ISGS, coupled with a major upsurge in jihadi activities in the whole Sahelian region, but personal and doctrinal differences, harsh propaganda towards each other, and other forces keep these group at loggerheads. Despite these regroupings and continuing threats, regional powers rarely follow coherent, cohesive, or unified strategies to confront them; instead, we see a multiplication of divergent strategies reflecting conflicts of interests and between the long-terms policy goals of each regional and international actors. The French-led G5 Sahel is opposed by the leading regional power, Algeria, often characterized as “a reluctant power” despite the threat coming from within its eastern and southern frontiers. Likewise, Morocco and Algeria often fail to cooperate even when their interests align. The American-led Trans-Saharan Counterterrorism Partnership has operated independently of other security groupings since 2002 with little coordination. Using the framework of the dilemmas of collective action (Sandler, Olson, Frohlish, Oye, and Elster, among others), this paper offers an in-depth analysis of the difficulties in putting in place either a unified jihadi front or a collective security architecture of response. This paper rests seven years of extensive fieldwork, including hundreds of interviews conducted since 2011 in nearly every Maghreb and Sahel nation and including both regional security officials and former jihadists.

China’s longstanding and complex relations with North African nations have been alternatively characterized as both ideological and pragmatic, and both mercantile and developmental, but rarely rigorously analyzed through the lens of international relations theory. Contrary to most Western academic, media, and political depictions, China is neither a newcomer nor a new colonial power. Not only had China established multifaceted relations with Egypt from 1956 onward, but China was also the first non-Arab country to have recognized the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic in 1958, four years before Algeria’s independence. The two states have maintained close and growing relations ever since; five years ago, China surpassed France to become Algeria’s leading trading partner. This paper analyzes the evolution of China’s political, economic, military, and cultural relations with the Maghreb States and Egypt. It discusses the trajectory of China’s vicissitudes in its foreign policy, namely from radical, ideological principles in the 1950s-1970s to pragmatism since 1978, but with elements of its ongoing relationship, with evolving ideological and pragmatic dimensions. Algeria and Egypt are China’s strategic partners, a status that only select states have obtained. The paper also focuses on China’s attempts to include the North African countries in the maritime route of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and China’s policies regarding the so-called “Arab Spring.” China has arguably sought to use soft-power and mediation diplomacy to reconcile the parties engaged in conflicts and help them in post-conflict reconstruction. The paper examines how each North African state views China; it also highlights the incongruities between BRI’s stated objectives and the geopolitical realities of those states. The paper will also scrutinize the growth of trade and security relations between China and the region since the 2011 uprisings. One of the objectives is to determine whether China’s emergence as a global power represents a new approach to international relations (“win-win cooperation”) or, is driven by the long-standing logic of neorealist power politics (J. Mearsheimer) and capitalism (in its commercial form). This raises a related question as to whether the Maghreb and Egypt intend on playing China against Western powers or are merely interested in commercial gains with China. Contrasting neorealist and constructivist approaches will help shed light on these questions. This paper also draws from over a dozen trips to China and dozens of interviews with Chinese scholars and officials.

Algeria’s foreign policy, world renowned prior to the Black Decade, has undergone interesting evolutions since Bouteflika’s coming to power in 1999. Continuities and shifts are ideologically grounded and geostrategically sophisticated. Algeria emerged from the international approbation of the 1990s with the return of a “prodigal son” who had served as newly independent Algeria’s youngest and longest serving foreign minister, driven to help Algeria recapture its international standing. Mischaracterizations of Algeria’s foreign policy persist, plagued with fallacies. Among these are the beliefs that 1) Algeria was a close Soviet ally, 2) Algeria obeys a non-interventionist principle, 3) Algeria never sends troops beyond its borders, 4) Algeria was internationally absent iduring the civil war, 5) Algeria displayed solidarity toward Muslim communities in the Balkans in the 1990s, 6) Algeria supported Qaddafi., 7) Algeria supports political Islam, and 8) Algeria is opposed to the Saudi-Emirati-led military intervention in Yemen. None of these simplistic notions are accurate, and all mask complex realities. Yet, they still influence international affairs observers interested in Algeria’s growing regional importance. These persistent beliefs also make it difficult to assess Algiers' response to new challenges and to advocate how best to engage Algeria. In order to minimize such perceptional noise and promote a more analytically rigorous understanding of Algeria’s foreign-policy calculus and modi operandi, my presentation re-examines the last two decades through Algiers’ eyes. For each period in world affairs, in response to every major crisis—whether local, regional or global—Algeria’s foreign policy continued to operate within certain ideological principles but also attempting to obey concrete geostrategic imperatives. Some constraints—or “pillars”—have been constant throughout. Others have undergone drastic transformations. Most notably, Algeria’s relations with the Russian Federation have evolved from one built on a degree of security cooperation and strategic alignment to a multi-dimensional relationship with significant economic and geostrategic consequences, for both Europe and MENA. By locating Algiers within an international environment that itself has been changing in a profound manner since 1999, I will help outline criteria, exceptions and trends useful to assess Algerian foreign policy in the past, present and future. Relying upon both the historical record and extant literature, supplemented by extensive original fieldwork conducted in Algeria, the presentation will succinctly revisit a series of episodes and crises. Light will be shed on Algerian policymakers’ universal rules—or, in some particular cases, the lack thereof.

American and Arab Gulf relations with the Maghreb have suffered from a variety of deficiencies ranging from tunnel vision to lack of vision and from transactional proxy battles to transactionless withdrawals. None of the traditional approaches to international relations theory offer satisfactory explanations nor remedies for increasing dysfuntionalities in these relationships, in large part because these theories privilege one set of relationships over another, while insufficiently theorizing and addressing the main motors of regional instability, those which are not primarily state-driven, institutionally driven, socially-constructed nor grounded in poverty and economic marginalization. This paper analyzes the ongoing failure of American and Gulf engagements in the Maghreb adequately to address major challenges afflicting the region due to errors of analysis, strategy and implementation, the latter failures often having to do with optics, process, and scaling. The paper will examine failures to find a path towards peace and stability in Libya, failures to help Tunisia produce tangible revolutionary dividends, failures in reform assistance in every Maghreb country, and, when policies do adequately address the most pressing problems, failure to effect desired change or scale to challenges, whether, for example, in reducing corruption, assisting with the establishment of the rule of law, or empowering youth. The paper then looks at what theoretical building blocks will be necessary to analyze the causes of current systemic failures, in both theory and practice, and what elements of these new approaches can influence policy reorientation and improve project design. The paper is based in large part on the author's experience in a variety of government, non-government, and analytical organizations and roles over three decades, which made thousands of conversations and interactions all of the donor countries and recipient countries of international assistance to the Maghreb possible. This empirical data is supplemented by the author's previous experience interviewing over 5000 young people in all five Maghreb country while working in a variety of research and professional capacities, much of that during 13 years of residence in the region. This data is organized around episodes in American-Maghreb and GCC-Maghreb engagements--including a number of MEPI programs--framed as cautionary tales/learning moments. These will be compared with GCC funding in a variety of sectors, with none of the donors analyzed applying much conditionality. The conclusion of the paper will lay out analytical frames and tools to assist in re-imagining these relationships.