Let’s put cities at the center of the Africa Leaders Summit

This week in Washington, the White House is hosting nearly 50 leaders from across the African continent for the second U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit. The goal is to demonstrate America’s “enduring commitment to Africa and … underscore the importance of U.S.-Africa relations and increased cooperation on shared global priorities.” The Biden administration deserves credit for trying to make up for its predecessor’s neglect of sub-Saharan Africa. However, as has been well documented, it is the predatory behavior of some of the leaders themselves and the governments they lead that have been barriers to achieving some of the very goals the summit seeks to advance.  

These include objectives related to promoting peace, security and good governance, and safeguarding human rights. Given China’s and Russia’s increasing engagements with African leaders and their investment in African countries, Washington has little choice but to use carrots and sticks to try to change the behavior of at least some of the unsavory African leaders.

However, to mitigate criticism of the guest list levied by longtime Africa watchers and human rights and pro-democracy advocates, the White House should use the occasion to announce its intention to convene a first-of-its-kind U.S.-Africa Cities Summit in 2023, following the model of the Cities Summit of the Americas scheduled for April. Such an announcement would underscore America’s commitment to supporting locally-led solutions to some of the most pressing challenges the African continent faces. 

It also would highlight  the important role that local leaders and governments must play, often in spite of national governments, in addressing them. Perhaps nowhere is this more so than when it comes to rising levels of violent extremism across the African continent.

By focusing attention on the role that local actors can play in identifying and addressing the grievances that terrorists and other violent groups have used to recruit and radicalize followers, the event would help change the approach to counterterrorism from one that’s largely reactive and overly securitized. As the bipartisan Global Fragility Act (2019) and the U.S. Strategy to Prevent Conflict and Promote Stability (2022) both recognize, such an approach has often exacerbated the underlying drivers of violence, which, in turn, further emboldens some of the national leaders whose behavior the White House is hoping to positively influence in Washington this week.

The United Nations has pointed to the limitations of a security-heavy approach. Such methods have been funded by investments predicated on strengthening national security sector capacities, without ensuring that the necessary human rights safeguards are in place, even in countries without a strong rule-of-law tradition. At the same time, those securitized responses have been prioritized by international partners, including the U.N. Security Council, for more than 20 years. They continue to encourage national governments to strengthen their legal and operational tools and security sector capacities to counter terrorism, while putting few guiderails in place to prevent government abuse of them. 

Africa’s extremist landscape remains volatile, with varied forms of conflict polarizing communities and driving violence. According the 2022 Global Terrorism Index, nearly half of global deaths attributed to violent extremist groups in 2021 took place in sub-Saharan Africa.  The threat has spread so that now even southern and coastal West Africa, two parts of the continent that for much of the post-9/11 period seemed immune, are now threatened. 

The rising levels of extremist and related violence have devastated livelihoods and undermined development gains across the continent. Reversing the threat trajectory is critical. However, particularly with the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS and much of the international counterterrorism community increasingly focused on West Africa, there is a real risk that leaders from that region will leverage that attention to attract more security-oriented investments from international partners, thus reinforcing a counterterrorism paradigm that has helped far too many African leaders further consolidate their power and to promote state, rather than human, security.  

A more decentralized and less securitized answer is long overdue: It is time to heed the advice of many experts, as well as the U.N. Secretary-General, to focus more attention on addressing the drivers, rather than the manifestations, of extremist violence. This approach invests in local governments and local leaders — whether in urban centers, remote border villages, or rural towns — and their largely untapped potential for prevention, including by addressing local grievances that are often at the root of the violence. 

Extremist groups across Africa are capitalizing on grievances for recruitment and using local injustices as entry points into communities. They exploit inter- and intra-communal needs and tensions to recruit members or gain support. Because of their interactions with communities, local authorities can deliver in ways that national governments, particularly their security actors, cannot. These local leaders can develop and promote the concept of “city-connectedness,”which can make citizens from different ethnicities, tribes and religions feel connected to one another and foster trust in local government institutions. Developing such an identity also can help local authorities mobilize different people to build a unified, local front against extremism.

Local governments are well-positioned to recognize, understand and respond to hyper-local contexts that extremists exploit. They can address social, economic or political grievances, which could lead to violence if ignored. This might involve building trust between historically marginalized communities and security actors; engaging young people; and tapping into social, health, education, housing, youth, sports and cultural resources to address the needs and priorities of those who are most prone to radicalization. 

Yet, despite these and other advantages, mayors and cities in Africa — much like in many other parts of the world — are typically overlooked by national governments when it comes to contributing to the effort to address violent extremism. As a result, they lack the necessary mandate, resources and capacities to deliver on their advantages.

In addition to boosting the contributions of local leaders and governments across Africa, a U.S.-Africa Cities Summit could give momentum to a new paradigm for addressing extremist political violence. The summit would send a signal to mayors, governors and other local leaders in Africa that they have a central role to play in prevention and, importantly, would help this new approach to take root.

Eric Rosand is executive director of the Strong Cities Network. The views expressed here are his alone. Follow him on Twitter @RosandEric.