Across Africa today, both the scale and complexity of state fragility is unprecedented as countries grapple with multiple overlapping challenges, including a burgeoning youth population, mass migration, climate change and variance, food insecurity, and economic recession brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, among others. State fragility, where the state does not maintain a monopoly on violence, usually goes hand in hand with highly complex and precarious governance environments, often involving bargains and concessions between elites, the state, non-state actors, as well as formal, and informal security structures. However, despite the importance and reality of these localised dynamics, counterterrorism policy and security coordination usually remains at the highest political/geopolitical level.
