Africa and Western Asia

July - December 2024

During the second half of 2024, key trends in Africa and West Asia included armed conflict, attacks on opposition parties, new media restrictions and protests. Sixteen national elections took place during this period.

Looking ahead, it will be important to continue to monitor the region’s many armed conflicts, as well as the peace processes in Gaza and Lebanon. Also worth watching are the political transitions in countries such as South Sudan, Chad, Gabon, Libya and Syria and rights-restricting bills in Iraq, Burkina Faso and Zimbabwe. Finally, the elections scheduled for the first half of 2025 in Togo, Gabon, Comoros and Burundi all warrant attention.

Emerging patterns

What are some important thematic trends that have emerged over the last 6 months?

Representation

Restrictions on political party freedoms remained one of the starkest trends during the second half of 2024. Of these, attacks on the personal integrity and security of opposition members and supporters were the most widely reported, including in Eswatini, Mozambique, Tanzania, Uganda and Zimbabwe.

Blanket bans on political parties continued to be a live issue, with Guinea dissolving and suspending over one hundred parties. There were, however, positive developments in Mali, where the junta lifted a suspension on political parties and associations, and in Gabon, where proposals for a similar measure were omitted from the country’s new constitution.

Rights

Armed conflicts in Africa and West Asia continued to negatively impact rights. Intensified fighting in Palestine and Sudan left millions without access to basic necessities.

In Palestine, freedom of the press was undermined by the Israeli military’s shuttering of the Ramallah offices of Al Jazeera, one of the few international media outlets reporting from Gaza. Media freedoms have also been curtailed in Tanzania, where a major newspaper publisher was suspended, in Chad and Cameroon, which imposed stringent new reporting restrictions, and in Burkina Faso, where several journalists disappeared in a spate of suspected state abductions. Concerns were further raised by the launch of a joint media platform by Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger, where the juntas are attempting to strengthen state-controlled information and counter critical international reporting.

Another area of concern is LGBTQIA+ rights, with draft legislation in Mali and Burkina Faso poised to criminalize homosexuality and a growth in anti-LGBTQIA+ rhetoric and violence in Côte d’Ivoire.

There have been several positive developments concerning access to justice for historical crimes. In Guinea and Uganda, convictions for crimes against humanity were secured in domestic courts for atrocities committed by former Guinean President Moussa Dadis Camara and rebel commander Thomas Kwoyelo, respectively. ECOWAS approved the establishment of a Special Tribunal for The Gambia to prosecute crimes committed under former President Yahya Jammeh’s rule and, in Zimbabwe, President Mnangagwa launched community hearings over the ‘Gukurahundi’ massacres carried out by the country’s military in the 1980s.

Rule of Law

Armed conflict and insecurity have had a major impact on the rule of law, particularly personal integrity and security. In the Middle East, the spillover of the Gaza war to the West Bank and Lebanon has significantly increased the number of civilian casualties and led to several political assassinations, including that of Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah. Civilian casualties also spiked in Sudan, with attacks carried out on displacement camps, villages and markets. Mali, Burkina Faso and Oman suffered major terrorist attacks on civilian targets in the second half of 2024. Reports of alleged torture in Israel and Lesotho, a country suffering from escalating gang violence, reflect the challenges of protecting human rights in contexts of conflict and insecurity.

Judicial independence also faced setbacks. These included allegations of undue executive interference in the courts in Burkina Faso, following the junta’s forced conscription of several magistrates, and in Zambia, where President Hakainde Hichilema dismissed three Constitutional Court judges who had previously ruled against him. Questions were also raised in Tunisia when, ahead of the country’s presidential election, the electoral commission repeatedly refused to comply with the Administrative Court’s order to reinstate three opposition candidates, and then again when the Court was subsequently stripped of its electoral dispute jurisdiction.

Participation

There were 16 national elections in Africa and Western Asia in the second half of the 2024 election supercycle – six presidential and ten parliamentary. The average voter turnout was 60.3 per cent. Tunisia’s presidential election saw a particularly low turnout of 28.8 per cent, but a majority of countries recorded higher participation, with Namibia reaching a two-decades high. In the countries that held parliamentary elections, average female representation in parliament increased from 27.5 to 28.9 per cent and Namibia’s Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah was the only female president elected in the region (the first in Namibia’s history). Incumbent governments lost elections in Mauritius, Ghana and Botswana, which experienced its first transition of power since independence in 1966. Elections were postponed in South Sudan, Cameroon and Guinea-Bissau.

Beyond elections, civic engagement through protest remained significant. Kenya’s youth-led protests inspired similar mobilizations in other parts of Africa, most notably in Nigeria, where tens of thousands took to the streets across the country to demonstrate against rising costs of living. Elsewhere major protests erupted over a range of issues including elections (Mozambique, Ghana, Syria), illegal mining (Ghana), the abduction of activists (Guinea) and the assassination of the Hamas leader, Ismail Haniyeh (Palestine). Yet, in many contexts, protesters have had to contend with repressive policing, that in extreme instances, such as in Mozambique, Nigeria and Kenya left many dead, injured and forcibly disappeared. Civic space also shrank through restrictive legislation curtailing civil liberties, such as in that enacted in Angola, while in Ethiopia, 1,500 civil society organizations were shut down for failing to meet stringent reporting requirements.

What is important to watch over the next 6 months?

Looking ahead, the impact of ongoing armed conflicts on Rights and Rule of Law will remain important to monitor. African countries to watch in this regard include, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mozambique, Somalia, Ethiopia (particularly the ongoing insurgencies in Amhara and Oromia regions), as well as many parts of the conflict-affected Sahel region, especially Sudan, where experts warn of an acute risk of further ethnic killings and genocide. In West Asia, monitoring the fragile ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas as well as the ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon will be key.

The second half of 2024 further highlighted the precariousness of democratic transitions in the region, which should continue to be monitored. The latest postponement of South Sudan’s elections pushes its first post-independence elections to 2026. Chad’s parliamentary elections continued its transition from military rule, but new media restrictions and attacks on political parties have raised concerns about its trajectory. Elsewhere in Central Africa, Gabon is also transitioning from military rule, with elections due in 2025, following approval of its new in November. In Libya, the completion of the first phase of municipal elections in November marked progress towards long-delayed general elections and the establishment of a unified national government. The trajectory of Syria’s political transition following the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s authoritarian regime, also bears watching.

In the legislative arena, a draft law in Burkina Faso threatens to restrict the rights of the LGBTQIA+ community, and there are fears that amendments to Iraq’s family law that will give a central role to religious doctrines will undermine Gender Equality (proposed changes to Moroccan family law offer a positive counterpoint). Also of concern are renewed efforts in Zimbabwe to enact legislation that would significantly extend executive powers over civil society organizations.

During the first half of 2025, national elections will be held in Togo, Gabon, Comoros and Burundi .

What we are reading

Zeinab Badawi's An African History of Africa (2024) offers a transformative narrative of the continent’s past by centering African voices and traditions. Through extensive engagement with local historians and storytellers, Badawi challenges colonial frameworks and emphasizes Africa's rich legacy. By reclaiming and validating African historical narratives, the book fosters a sense of identity and pride essential for democratic engagement. Recognizing and integrating these perspectives can lead to more inclusive governance structures that respect and represent the continent's diverse populations. The work also prompts reflection on the role of historical understanding in shaping democratic futures. It raises questions about how decolonized histories can be incorporated into educational systems to cultivate informed citizens and how such narratives can address present inequalities, thereby strengthening democracies across the region.

Making Sense of the Arab State (2024) is an edited volume by Steven Heydemann and Marc Lynch, and a pivotal resource for anyone interested in exploring governance, state dynamics, and the prospects for democracy in Western Asia and North Africa. The essays are written by leading experts and challenge the conventional portrayal of Arab states as inherently weak by Western standards. Instead, it highlights the resilience and adaptability of these regimes, focusing on how authoritarian governance persists amid intense economic and social pressures, particularly following the 2011 uprisings. The book shifts the analytical lens from deficiencies to the mechanisms underpinning regime survival, exploring how regimes effectively employ coercion, sectarianism, and non-state governance to consolidate power. By rethinking state capacity and regime resilience, it provides a nuanced understanding of the structural and institutional strategies that sustain authoritarian rule. This perspective is indispensable for those seeking to understand the trajectories of governance in the region and its democratic prospects.

African Insights 2024: Democracy at risk – the people’s perspective (2024) is the inaugural flagship report of Afrobarometer, a pan-African research network and the pre-eminent collector of data on African perceptions of democracy, governance, the economy and society. Drawing on over a decade’s worth of data from 39 countries, the report comes to a number of key conclusions about African attitudes towards democracy. The first is that support for democracy remains reasonably strong. On average, two thirds of those it surveyed expressed a preference for democracy over any other system of government. It finds, however, that satisfaction with democracy is weaker - only 45 per cent of respondents thought their countries were mostly or completely democratic. Moreover, preference for democracy and satisfaction with how it is performing are both in decline. Interestingly, Afrobarometer’s analysis finds that while deepening dissatisfaction with democracy is strongly associated with perceived declines in political and socioeconomic performance, declining preference for democracy seems to be driven primarily by political factors, such as corruption in local government, poor quality elections and a lack of presidential accountability.