Dedication To my mother Marème Fall my father Amadou Chimère Diaw my wife Isabelle Diaw my children Fatou-Chimère Diaw, Ahmadou-Chimère Diaw, Marième-Chimère Diaw, Aïssata-Chimère Diaw . my grandparents Fatou Methiour Ndiaye & Waly Sega Fall Fatou Faye & Souleymane Chimère Diaw Teachers To those who shall come into the world a century after me, beginning in the year two thousand and seventy-two.
Defense is one of the fundamental attributes of any sovereign political entity. Without an autonomous capacity to protect its territory, its populations, and its vital interests, no political construction can claim genuine sovereignty. Yet in Africa south of the Sahara, defense continues to be conceptualized almost exclusively within a strictly national framework, inherited from colonial borders and fragmented state structures. This fragmentation stands in stark contrast to the region’s demographic and economic dynamics. By 2050, Africa south of the Sahara will count approximately 2.1 billion inhabitants; by 2100, more than 3.3 billion. Such a human mass, concentrated within a continuous geographical space, cannot sustainably be protected by a mosaic of weakly coordinated, under-equipped national armed forces that are often dependent on asymmetric security partnerships. This article advances the argument that a single, integrated Defense, embedded within a Federation of States in Africa south of the Sahara, constitutes the only structurally coherent response to contemporary and future security challenges.
EN : https://archive.org/details/towards-a-federal-african-defense-building-a-unified-military-architecture-for-t