Author: Claude Biao
Source: The African Geopolitical ATLAS 2025: Conflicting information, conflicted realities
Publisher: Stake Books
DOI: https://doi.org/10.63542/yqkf8198
Document Type: Book chapter (Note of the editor)
Publication date: May 5, 2025
Keywords: information and conflict; information disorder; conflict escalation; disinformation in Africa; information warfare; postcolonial epistemology
ABSTRACT - What if the infamous 1994 Radio Mille Collines had been around in the era of TikTok, WhatsApp, Facebook and Twitter? This extreme thought experiment captures, in a nutshell, the predominant fears and worries that policymakers, academia, and sometimes the public associate with information conflict in a digitally hyperconnected world. Although the Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM)—the Rwandan radio station known for having put its broadcasting waves to the service of one of the deadliest genocides of the twentieth century (Newbury 1995, 12)— has become one of the best examples of the potential harm of carefully crafted and disseminated misinformation and disinformation in leading to conflict escalation, its relevance goes beyond the initiation of conflicts and includes sustaining and fueling it.
Information has persistently occupied a central role in initiating and developing conflicts on the African continent. Whether legitimate and accurate or voluntarily or involuntarily misleading information, its role and interaction with reality warrants tags such as disinformation, misinformation, or propaganda. Recent examples in the Sahel and Central Africa indicate some external intervention in creating and disseminating disinformation and propaganda (Peruchon 2024), although there is an inherently internal aspect to this dynamic. Indeed, since information is essential for shaping “subjectivities”—that is, subject-constructed knowledge, perceptions and, ultimately, reality—conflict actors and other interested third parties frequently attempt to establish or control conflict through various tactics, including misinformation, disinformation and propaganda.
This realisation provides the primary rationale for the second edition of The African Geopolitical ATLAS by Stake experts. Given that information and conflict intersect, it is relevant to use maps—arguably the most effective medium to make sense of conflicts—as an underlying material for physically representing that intersection. Several questions underpin this endeavour. These questions include how information is relayed or stored, what structural or social inequalities or power dynamics regulate its flow, what physical determinants play a role in its creation and dissemination, and most importantly, how these physical, structural, and social features influence or determine the interaction between information and conflict in Africa, ultimately leading to conflicting subjectivities.
Two assumptions support these research questions. The first one is that information does indeed intersect and interact with conflicts on the African continent. As illustrated in the previous RTLM example, several conflicts across the continent over the past decade—terrorism in the Sahel and the wars in Sudan and the DRC, to name a few—have shown how populations’ knowledge and perceptions of reality have become yet another territory to conquer and control. However, warring actors and interested third parties cannot achieve this control of populations’ subjectivities through military campaigns. Instead, they exploit interconnected networks of political and economic influence, media ownership or funding, and troll armies, along with restrictive measures against media or journalists, to effectively promote and project their own subjectivities onto populations.
The second assumption is that this interaction between information and conflict is significant enough to impact conflict developments and the behaviours of actors and interested third parties in the conflicts. As a research consultancy firm specialising in conflict research in sub-Saharan Africa, Stake experts observed how the military regimes in countries like Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger effectively exploited information to entrench their hold on political power. One telling event is the gathering of the population in Niamey in July 2023, allegedly to use their bodies as “human shields” to block any military intervention by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) against the new regime (L’Informateur 2023). Arguably, the widely shared stories surrounding that event significantly supported Niger regime’s strategy of discrediting the regional institution as a broker of peace and stability in the country.
In this edition of the ATLAS, Stake experts aims to examine these questions from a critical, post-colonialist and constructivist theoretical standpoint. This volume challenges the dominant assumptions on information, such as the central role of the internet as a “neutral” tool for information dissemination or the realist theoretical perception of states as sole players or power brokers in the information space. Instead, using specific perspectives and case studies from African scholars and practitioners, this volume points out a conflictual intersection of subjectivities in the information space, whereby information—and, therefore, perceived realities—is constructed through the intertwining of power dynamics, colonial legacies in framing African state actors, while the struggle for legitimacy imposes one’s subjective “truth” over others. Hence, although this volume admits some structural representation surrounding key concepts such as access, reach, and dissemination of information, it does so from the standpoint of seeing them as necessary fuels and tools for those conflictual intersections of subjectivities. To establish the ontological background of this volume, I first review the existing critical literature on information in Africa. Secondly, I examine the nexus between information and conflict reality through two critical intersections: information as a feature of the conflict terrain, and information as a long-term conflict knowledge generation platform. Finally, I detail the structure of the volume and the guest authors’ contributions, whose diverse and acute perspectives greatly enriched the debate in this 2025 edition of Stake experts’s African Geopolitical ATLAS.
CLAUDE BIAO is a conflict researcher and analyst with over a decade of experience in conflict dynamics, terrorism, and governance in Sub-Saharan Africa. He is the co-founder and Senior Conflict Analyst at Stake experts, where he leads conflict research and provides strategic analysis and early warning support to international organisations and development actors across the region. His experience includes leading USAID/OTI-funded programming in Benin and advising on numerous projects focused on preventing violent extremism. Claude is also the author of États et Terrorismes en Afrique and has published widely on conflict narratives, terrorism, and intrastate insurgencies in West Africa.
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