Turkish coup d'état

• Armed pirates hijacked ships as far away as 1,000 nautical miles from the Somali coast.
• The World Bank estimates that Somali pirates received more than US$400 million in ransom payments between 2005 and 2012.
• It was, therefore, generally held that the solution lay ashore: major state-building in Somalia to remove the root causes of piracy.

• What makes the Somali case special is the international community’s ability to agree to them and pay for their implementation.
• Further, Somali pirates were stopped even though the conditions onshore in Somalia didn’t improve in any major way.

Collective action

• Theoretically, the international community’s collective effort shouldn’t have happened because safety from piracy is a costly public good.
• The result is a collective action problem that’s rarely overcome in international politics.
• Our study sought to understand how and why the collective action problem was overcome.

What worked

• This induced France to take the lead in military action against the pirates.
• The US subsequently led with respect to formulating a comprehensive strategy to implement the four factors presented earlier.
• China and Russia supported the American-led strategy and launched their own naval operations because their ships were attacked as well.
• Second, the US established an institution, the Contact Group on Somali Piracy, tailor-made to formulate and implement a broad anti-piracy strategy.

Shared interests

• Somali piracy aligned great power, as well as private sector, regional and local state interests to an unusual degree.
• It was the high degree of shared interests among the many actors involved that made the Somali anti-piracy campaign so effective.

• Its roots can be traced back to when deposed president Ali Bongo Ondimba suffered a stroke in 2018.
• The group also includes powerful clan members inside the Bongo dynasty jockeying for position and wealth in the uncertainty surrounding Ali Bongo’s health.
• Factors in favour of coup
  Before the coup d’état there was little hope that Ali Bongo Ondimba would lose his third re-election bid.
• Now that a coup appears to have achieved that, it will be difficult for Albert Ondo Ossa to take office.

• This is because Russian history has swung back and forth between chaos and autocracy, which have become mutually reinforcing symptoms of the same historical condition.
• Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin has come to symbolise a new cycle of this history taking place in Russia today.
• Whether or not Prigozhin may have exposed Putin’s vulnerabilities, history suggests that what is to come could well be worse.
• By referencing the smuta Putin was reminding Russians of the profound dangers of dissent – and of his mandate to suppress it.

The gathering of the lands

• The campaign, begun under his predecessor Ivan III (“Ivan the Great”), is known as the “Gathering of the Lands”.
• Ever since, Russian leaders have perpetuated the idea that Russia must dominate its peripheral lands as a defensive act of national survival.
• The terror he wrought on his people, economy and lands through years of war and repression sowed the seeds for the smuta to come.

Boris Godunov

• Boris Godunov was inspired by a period of crisis that forms the bedrock of Russia’s national mythology.
• Pushkin’s play tells the story of Boris Godunov, a Russian nobleman who came to power at the end of the 16th century during the “Time of Troubles”, the first period of smuta – a succession crisis that began in 1598 with the death of Tsar Fyodor I, the last of Russia’s founding Rurikid dynasty.
• When Fyodor died childless with no appointed heir, his brother-in-law Boris seized the throne, becoming Russia’s first non-Rurikid Tsar.
• Pushkin’s play ends as Boris, haggard in the face of increasing dissent, dies as a result of foul play.

Smuta

• Otrepyev was crowned Tsar Dmitry I, but his reign lasted less than a year.
• Over the following eight years a brutal struggle for sovereignty took hold.
• The smuta thus ended with the founding of a new autocratic bloodline that would rule and expand the Russian Empire for the next 300 years.
• It has been used to justify the absolutism and revanchism of Russian leaders from Tsars through to Soviet Commissars and modern-day politicians.

Divine right

• Russian Tsars were legitimised by the myth of divine right, meaning their power and authority as “Guardian of Holy Russia” was derived from God, rather than the Russian people.
• The General Secretary of the Communist Party was vested by the laws of History to lead Russians and their Soviet comrades along the true path to their glorious future.
• Putin has made it his spiritual mission to shield the Russia from the chaos of democratic and liberal freedoms.
• Read more:
  'Today is not my day': how Russia's journalists, writers and artists are turning silence into speech

The roots of Russian silence

• All he asked for in return was “unity”, which in Russian is a byword for passivity and acquiescence.
• The passivity of the Russian people often baffles the Western world, particularly in response to the war in Ukraine, which is being waged in their name.
• Pushkin describes the narod – the Russian people – as “obedient to the suggestion of the moment, deaf and indifferent to the actual truth, a beast that feeds upon fables”.
• The truth is that the Russian ruler’s prerogative as tsar-batiushka or “Father Tsar” can only hold sway over an acquiescent, even infantilised realm.
• An old question arises: will the Russian people remain silent?

• The complexity of the Sahel means that the Niger coup has major implications for security in the entire region.
• Based on years of research and analysis, I see four main potential effects of the Niger coup on the Sahel region and west Africa.

None of these would be good outcomes. They would worsen existing humanitarian crises, including food insecurity, environmental disasters, transnational crime, population displacements and widespread poverty.

Cross-border development projects

• The Sahel region is home to several critical transnational development projects, many of which involve Niger.
• An example is US$25 billion Nigeria-Morocco Gas Pipeline, one of the most ambitious projects in west Africa.
• The collapse of trust between countries will severely compromise the future of these projects and agreements.

Regional rifts and a divided Ecowas

• Growing mistrust among west African countries would weaken the regional bloc Ecowas, while the possibility of future coups remains.
• Ecowas has insisted on forcing the junta in Niger to reinstate the ousted President Mohamed Bazoum, including threatening military intervention.
• A weakened and divided Ecowas could undo regional economic agendas like the West African Economic and Monetary Union.

Shifting alliances

• The Niger coup is threatening to shift alliances.
• This could trigger security priorities and responsibilities being outsourced even more than they are now.
• Several western countries – the US, France and their EU partners – have scaled back their support for Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso in response to coups.
• The second is that it is the world’s seventh-largest producer of uranium and the second-largest supplier of uranium to France.

Chaos and counter-coups

• The coup could hurt cooperative efforts across the Sahel to respond to extremist groups and terrorism.
• Each coup creates a new vacuum and adds new layers to the environment of distrust.
• The danger is that security forces are spread thinner, allowing extremist groups to expand their territories and influence.