A decade of increasing activity by African militant jihadist groups has made Africa the global epicenter of terrorism. While scholars and policy makers often argue that external intervention is the solution to the violence in states they consider fragile or failed, invoking the Responsibility to Protect as justification, I show that African states themselves can actually address this violence successfully using varied, and sometimes unexpected means to protect their own people and borders. To understand this situation fully, Violent Extremism and Security brings to the forefront the need to redefine what successful terrorism policy means and how it is evaluated.

Through comparative analysis of interviews, archival research, and secondary data, I reinterpret facts on the ground using a decolonialization perspective in my critical discourse analysis of national and regional African counterterrorism strategies to show how African states define and address the problem of terrorism using three key conceptual categories: security, legitimacy, and sovereignty. I argue that these three terms are crucial to understanding both the threat and responses to global terrorism and, further, that scholarship and policymaking responses to this threat ought to think in the same terms. That is, I argue future research on African responses to terrorism should start from what the states themselves are doing to define and address the problem. Although the operations of violent extremist groups in Africa have continued to heighten fears in the global community, I demonstrate that neo-colonial justifications of Western security reform approaches and interventions have continued to ignore the active and creative ways African governments are responding to violent extremism, preferring instead to focus on the failure of the state and the effectiveness of foreign intervention in solving Africa’s challenges, which have implications on Africa’s agency in its stability and development.

In addressing Africa’s new security threat, this timely book makes clear the need to incorporate African narratives and perspectives in uncoupling the legacies of colonialism that currently inform and are used to justify Western intervention. Such decolonialization approaches are necessary in tailoring assistance that will enhance the long-term resiliency of African states, ad-hoc regional security arrangements, and affected local communities in countering violent extremism and other transnational threats.