Report

Crime, terror and insecurity in Mozambique

This report from UK think tank RUSI provides a comprehensive analysis of Mozambique’s complex and layered security landscape.

Mozambique faces an array of security challenges, from resilient illicit economies to an enduring kidnapping problem and a long running insurgency in the north. Many security challenges play out at community level, yet local perceptions and experiences of insecurity are underrepresented, with existing evidence based on top-down research privileging established donor and governmental narratives.

Drawing on research across Angoche, Maputo, Montepuez, Nacala and Pemba, this report gives voice to bottom-up perspectives. It does so by analysing local-level inputs and lived experience to provide a more holistic appraisal of the security landscape and support more effective interventions.

The findings depict a multilayered system of local-level insecurity, with lived experience of key harms varying across time and place. Across the board, interviewees expressed an overriding concern with petty crime, street-level insecurity, state abuses and corruption – with terrorism perceived, in all sites but Pemba, as a more peripheral issue. This speaks to a potential discordance with the dominant approach of national and international stakeholders – one perceived by many interviewees as reductionist in its primary focus on countering Islamic fundamentalism.

Many of the threats playing out at a local level were viewed as interconnected. Notably, endemic corruption was positioned as the foremost factor shaping local political economies, enabling many of the challenges cited, from kidnap-for-ransom to burglary and transnational trafficking flows. Beyond system-wide harms, interviewees described individual risks where entrenched perverse incentives were held to divert officials from public protection mandates. Echoing past studies, the professed result was deep-seated antipathy to state authority and a breakdown of trust between communities and the state.