Violent Extremism in Mozambique: Drivers and links to transnational organised crime

By Martin Ewi, Liesl Louw-Vaudran, Willem Els, Richard Chelin, Yussuf Adam and Elisa Samuel Boerekamp

In 2016, the Global Terrorism Index (GTI) published by the Institute of Economics and Peace ranked Mozambique among the 51 countries in the world most affected by terrorism. Four years later, in 2020, the country had become one of top 15 most affected countries in the world. In Africa, the list includes countries such as Libya, Egypt, Cameroon, Mali, Somalia and Nigeria, which are renowned for terrorism. Mozambique was also rated among the three countries with the largest increases in terrorist deaths from the previous year. In 2021, it moved further up the ladder of notorious countries when the 2022 GTI ranked it 13th of 163 countries surveyed.

How and why did another African country with high potential for economic development and a promising democracy quickly descend into the abyss of instability? Was it a victim of the global franchising of terrorism or the result of deep-rooted internal grievances?

Pretoria, South Africa: Institute for Security Studies, 2022. 52p.