CONCEPT NOTE
In recent weeks, a number of developments and events happening in several countries in North Africa showed how local dynamics are becoming more and more connected: Three separate negotiations were concluded across space habitually treat as several: a French intelligence officer released in Bamako, eighty-eight Malian prisoners freed by the Front de Libération de l’Azawad, and an American hostage handed over in Benghazi — brokered respectively by Rabat, by Lomé with Algiers arguably in the background, and by Khalifa Haftar’s inner circle. The clustering was almost certainly coincidental, but the pattern it exposed is not. A few weeks later, Algiers moved to support the junta in Niamey, an unusual step for a foreign policy long defined by “influence without interference”, an answer to Morocco’s local activism, as Rabat promotes its Atlantic Initiative, converting logistical access to the ocean into political leverage over the landlocked Sahel. Further east, Egypt’s deep involvement in the Sudanese war, its unresolved contest with Ethiopia over the Nile, and its exposure to Red Sea maritime insecurity have pulled Cairo into a southern and eastern theatre it once managed at arm’s length — while the Sudanese conflict itself draws in external patrons whose footprints already run through Libya and the Sahel. Mediation, competition and projection now travel along the same axes, and along the same corridors, in a space that has become a single strategic system.
Transatlantic institutions have not followed. Geographic commands, ministerial bureaus, EU directorates and analytical desks remain organized around a North Africa–Sahel divide, and around a further separation of both from the Red Sea. What was once analytically defensible as three adjacent complexes — Red Sea, Maghreb, Sahel — now behaves as one Greater North African Security Complex, stretching from the Atlantic to the Horn. Events that cut across the old lines are read twice, or read late, or not read at all.
This conference examines what follows from taking that integration seriously. Panels will address the drivers of the shift — the Sahelization of jihadist networks, migratory pressure, the retreat of European security presence, the doctrinal and constitutional changes easing out-of-area action by regional states; the competitive dynamics now structuring the space, from the Algerian–Moroccan contest over the Alliance of Sahel States to the Nile and Red Sea files, and the analytically lazy reading of regional autonomy as Russian alignment; and the implications for Washington and European capitals when brokerage capacity increasingly sits with regional and sub-state actors whose reach ignores the boundaries around which Western policy is still built.
The question the conference poses is not whether those boundaries have eroded, but what a transatlantic posture organized around their absence would look like.
AGENDA
5:00 – 5:15 p.m. Welcoming remarks:
Jörn Fleck, Senior Director of Europe Center, Atlantic Council
Roberto Sgalla, Director, Centro Studi Americani
Will Wechsler, Senior Director of Middle East Program, Atlantic Council
5:15 – 5:30 p.m. Opening remarks:
Maurizio Greganti, Deputy Director General of Political Affairs and International Security, Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation
5:30 – 6:15 p.m. Discussion:
Hannah Armstrong, Independent Analyst; former Senior Consulting Analyst, International Crisis Group
Mohamed Kamal, Political Science Professor, El Cairo University
Can Kasapoğlu, Nonresident Senior Fellow, Hudson Institute
Caterina Roggero, Professor of Arab Culture, University of Milan-Bicocca and the University of Milan; Senior Research Fellow, ISPI
Moderator:
Karim Mezran, Director of the North Africa Initiative and Resident Senior Fellow, Atlantic Council
6:15 – 6:50 p.m. Q&A
6:50 – 7:00 p.m. Closing remarks:
Giampiero Massolo, Vice Chairman Non Executive, Mundys; Board Member, Centro Studi Americani; Member, ECFR Council
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