Assessing Impact of major Transnational Security Threats in Africa: Governance and Human Security Perspective

Abstract

Transnational security threats in Africa, such as violent extremism, organized crime, cybercrime and maritime insecurity, are often discussed separately and tackled from a state-centric, military-oriented perspective. The paper is based on Critical Security Studies. Political Economy approaches, with a qualitative documentary analysis of 54 institutional, academic and journalistic sources published between 2020 and 2026, and makes four claims: (1) the four threat domains are not analytically separable; (2) criminal syndicates exploit both digital and maritime infrastructure;
(3) the four exploit the same underlying governance deficits; and (4) the four cannot be coercively contained. To make the convergence claim more specific, the paper identifies five forms of interconnections between threat domains (from the same actors committing multiple crimes to shared infrastructure and enabling conditions to causal linkages) and explicitly excludes mere co-occurrence. It then maps six governance deficits (corruption and institutional capture, weak justice, limited regulatory capacity, border-management gaps, financial opacity, and socio-economic exclusion) onto each domain. It explores the political economy of extremist rebellion, the institutionalization of the illegal market, the increasingly digital surface and its weaponization against civil liberties, and the land-sea connection between illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing and piracy. Two empirical cases support this analysis: Burkina Faso, whose number of deaths due to terrorism dropped from 1,907 in 2023 to 1,532 in 2024, and 846 in 2025, without resolving the root causes of the conflict; and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) where approximately 70 per cent of the world's mined cobalt is produced, and 81.1 per cent of the population is living in extreme poverty, with more than 7.3 million people displaced. At the end of 2024, sub-Saharan Africa hosted 38.8 million internally displaced persons. Securitization paradox — increased security by the state, decreased security for the people — requires a move from coercion to governance: a human security approach with financial transparency, accountable justice systems and effective regional cooperation.