Report

Lessons from bottom-up analysis of crime, terror and insecurity in Africa

This report from UK think tank RUSI presents practical considerations arising from RUSI’s three-year project ‘Organised Crime, Terror and Insecurity in Africa’.

The report presents practical considerations arising from RUSI’s three-year project ‘Organised Crime, Terror and Insecurity in Africa’, which explores local perceptions and experiences of key security threats. The link between crime and terrorism remains a priority for the global security community. Yet a significant proportion of relevant research is top-down, led by national and international bodies, privileging knowledge and responses at national and regional level. Local-level expertise and experience remains underrepresented, often to the detriment of effective responses.

As such, donor investment in tackling crime, terror and insecurity has, at times, been predicated on external assumptions that do not adequately consider the experiences of local communities or the individuals that make up those communities. This obscures crucial overlaps and interlinkages that inform the way crime, terror and wider insecurity manifest, proliferate and persist, increasing the risk of ‘doing harm’ in donor programming.

This Policy Brief is the final output of RUSI’s three-year project, Organised Crime, Terror and Insecurity in Africa. The project addresses a critical gap in current knowledge on subnational perceptions of insecurity, building the evidence base from the bottom up and preferencing local involvement, inputs and lived experience. It explores the following research questions: How are crime, terrorism and other forms of insecurity perceived and experienced at the local level? What are the mechanisms conditioning local insecurity? What are the implications for interventions by national stakeholders and international donors?