Africa has entered a new era of war

Older wars, such as the Islamist uprisings in northern Nigeria and Somalia and the militia warfare in eastern Congo, have intensified dramatically. New power contests between militarized elites in Ethiopia and Sudan are convulsing two of Africa’s largest and most populous nations. The countries of the western Sahel are now the heart of global jihadism, where regional offshoots of al Qaeda and Islamic State are battling both each other and a group of wobbly military governments.

This corridor of conflict stretches across approximately 4,000 miles and encompasses about 10% of the total land mass of sub-Saharan Africa, an area that has doubled in just three years and today is about 10 times the size of the U.K., according to an analysis by political risk consulting firm Verisk Maplecroft. In its wake lies incalculable human suffering—mass displacement, atrocities against civilians and extreme hunger—on a continent that is already by far the poorest on the planet.

Yet, these extraordinary geopolitical shifts in sub-Saharan Africa have been overshadowed by higher-profile conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East. That has led to less attention from global policymakers—especially in the West—grossly underfunded humanitarian-aid programs and fundamental questions over the futures of hundreds of millions of people.

Conflicts in Africa have surged dramatically since 2010

Africa is now experiencing more conflicts than at any point since at least 1946, according to data collected by Uppsala University in Sweden and analyzed by Norway’s Peace Research Institute Oslo. This year alone, experts at the two institutes have identified 28 state-based conflicts across 16 of the continent’s 54 countries, more than in any other region in the world and double the count just a decade and a half ago. That tally doesn’t include conflicts that don’t involve government forces, for instance between different communities, and whose number has also doubled since 2010.

There is no single driver for the emergence and escalation of so many different conflicts across a huge and diverse geography. But, experts say, many of the most-affected states were left vulnerable after failing to settle on a strong mode of governance after independence—whether as functioning democracies or established authoritarian systems—or were destabilized during moments of once-in-a-generation political transitions.

The former French colonies in the Sahel—Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger—for decades were democracies in name only, regularly disrupted by military coups. Congo’s central government in Kinshasa, like Nigeria’s in Abuja, never managed to exert control over vast territories, opening the door for local and foreign leaders to compete for resources and power, often through violence.

In Ethiopia, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s efforts to centralize power after ending decades of dominance by the Tigray People’s Liberation Front in 2018 have sparked a series of rebellions and clashes between regional militias. In Sudan, two powerful generals turned into rivals after ousting longtime strongman Omar al-Bashir in 2019 and, two years later, a civilian government that was supposed to move the country to democracy.

One inflection point was the year 2011, when, amid the pro-democracy uprisings of the Arab Spring, militaries from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization intervened in Libya to support rebel forces fighting the country’s dictator Moammar Gadhafi. With Gadhafi’s death and Libya’s descent into chaos, thousands of armed men moved south into Mali, reigniting a Tuareg rebellion against the government in Bamako that coincided with the global expansion of extremist ideologies promoted by al Qaeda and Islamic State.

“With the Sahel, it’s clearly a problem of Libya’s collapse and the highway of arms and ideology that that creates," says Ken Opalo, a Kenyan academic and associate professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. “So you get weak states, lots of guns and young men leaving Libya and ideologies coming all the way from Pakistan. Then everything is on fire."

From Mali, the jihadist insurgency spread across porous borders into Burkina Faso and Niger, where new military juntas frustrated with the failure to defeat the militants have kicked out French and other Western troops. It now threatens coastal West African states such as Benin and Ghana. Today, 86% of the territory of Burkina Faso is affected by fighting between jihadists and state forces, according to Verisk Maplecroft’s analysis of incidents collected by the U.S.-based nonprofit monitoring service Armed Conflict Location and Event Data. For Nigeria, that number is 44%.

Civilians are coming under fire

Counting the dead in African conflicts is notoriously difficult. Access to the front lines for journalists and aid groups is often restricted. Phone-service and internet shutdowns that accompanied the wars in Sudan and Ethiopia’s Tigray region complicate efforts to track specific events and their death tolls. Many people don’t die in the fighting itself but from hunger and the breakdown of medical services.

For Ethiopia, for instance, experts at the University of Ghent in Belgium have estimated that the two-year war between the government and the TPLF caused the deaths of between 162,000 and 378,000 civilians. Acled, whose analysts scour local news sources and contacts for real-time conflict data, counted fewer than 20,000 war fatalities from the fighting itself.

What is clear from the data is that civilians are much more likely to be deliberately targeted in conflicts in Africa than in many wars elsewhere. In Ukraine, for instance, fewer than 7% of violent events Acled has recorded since February 2024 targeted civilians—compared with more than a third for African conflicts.

“More people are living with violence than ever before, and more people are continuously exposed to armed groups than ever before," says Clionadh Raleigh, the founder of Acled and a professor of Political Violence and Geography at the University of Sussex in the U.K.

The consequences go beyond the immediate loss of life. Stalled development, delayed elections and a broader sense of impunity are all reinforced by protracted conflict, Raleigh says.

Mass displacement

The intensifying conflicts have displaced a record number of Africans—most of them inside their own countries. The continent is now home to nearly half of the world’s internally displaced people, some 32.5 million at the end of 2023. That figure has tripled in just 15 years.

Displacement makes civilians, especially women and children, more vulnerable to the collateral effects of war. In the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo, local officials and health workers estimate that 80% of the women in displacement camps around Goma have been raped—many of them multiple times. In Sudan, home to the world’s first confirmed famine since 2017, the most hungry are people who have been ripped from their home communities and the jobs or fields that sustained their livelihoods.

Not a priority

Africa’s current conflicts haven’t prompted the outpouring of sympathy in the West that accompanied Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or the outrage ignited by Israel’s war in Gaza. There has been no equivalent to the Live Aid concerts motivated by the Ethiopian famine in the 1980s, the protest marches over the genocide in Darfur in the early 2000s or even the #BringBackOurGirls campaign linked to the abduction of 276 schoolgirls from the Nigerian town of Chibok 10 years ago.

That lack of popular attention has translated into a dearth of political action to resolve wars in Africa or alleviate the suffering. Africa’s share of official development aid from rich, mostly Western countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development is at its lowest level since at least 2000, according to an analysis by the nonprofit One Campaign.

And while funding for humanitarian aid, which makes up just a small slice of overall development aid, has increased, it hasn’t kept pace with expanding needs. The United Nations received just half of the $2.6 billion it said it needed in 2024 to provide humanitarian aid in Congo. Its appeals for Sudan were 64% funded, while Nigeria has received just 57% of its target.

It has also meant that diplomatic pressure on the United Arab Emirates, which, according to Wall Street Journal reporting, is supplying weapons and fighters to one of Sudan’s rival generals, has consistently taken a back seat to America’s desire to maintain the country’s support in the Middle East. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has visited Africa just four times since 2021—compared with 43 trips to Europe and 22 to the Middle East.

Other powers move in

In the absence of the U.S. and other Western governments, other powers have doubled down—and often to the detriment of local populations.

Russia has sent mercenaries to fight in Mali and the Central African Republic, deployments that, according to rights groups, have resulted in more violence against civilians. While the U.A.E. is supporting Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces, the country’s military is backed by Egypt, Iran and, most recently, Russia, allowing each side to keep on fighting. In Congo, Rwanda’s military is fighting alongside the insurgent March 23 Movement in a campaign that has displaced more than two million people.

Data from Uppsala University shows a sharp surge in internationalized civil wars in Africa and that those wars with foreign meddling are deadlier than civil conflicts without outside interference.

What next?

The U.S. remains the leading funder of humanitarian aid in Africa despite the distractions in Europe and the Middle East. Washington contributed 47% to the U.N.’s Sudan emergency response plan in 2024 and nearly 70% of that for Congo.

Other traditionally large donors, including Germany and the U.K., have already cut their aid budgets amid the crisis in Ukraine and economic problems at home. And many experts expect substantial changes to U.S. foreign and aid policy under the incoming Trump administration, especially toward U.N. agencies—and a further waning of American influence.

The U.S. and the U.N. “were able to hold a line about what would be considered beyond acceptable for some cases," says Acled’s Raleigh. “With the Trump administration coming in, that line will disappear. And so the self-interested conflicts that we’re seeing and the people creating violence across the continent will not be checked."

Write to Gabriele Steinhauser at Gabriele.Steinhauser@wsj.com, Andrew Barnett at andrew.barnett@wsj.com and Emma Brown at Emma.Brown@wsj.com