Earlier this month, protests against Comoran President Azali Assoumani turned violent, as armed protesters squared off against the military in the old town of Mutsamudu. Located on the archipelagic country’s island of Anjouan, the city has seen a wave of protests from locals following Assoumani’s victory in a controversial referendum, which upends the country’s power-sharing arrangement, held earlier this summer.

In a cabinet reshuffle last week, Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed appointed ten female ministers, comprising half of the all cabinet posts. Days later, Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame announced that Rwanda’s new cabinet would also be gender-balanced. The Ethiopian parliament elected its first female president, Sahle-Work Zewde.

Tyler Falish is a student in Fordham University’s Graduate Program in International Political Economy & Development and a former intern for the Council on Foreign Relations Africa Studies program. T…

On September 12 in Ethiopia, President Salva Kiir and former vice president and opposition leader Riek Machar signed what was meant to be the final peace deal in South Sudan’s civil war, bringing an end to nearly five years of fighting. The new deal would return Machar to power, where he would serve as the “first” of five vice presidents, and maintain Kiir as president.

In June 2018, the Islamic State in West Africa (ISWA) leader, Abu Mus’ab al-Barnawi, released a history of his jihadist movement. In 2017, the Ansaru leader, under the pseudonym Abu Usama al-Ansari, also released his own history, while Abubakar Shekau released a book in the name of the Boko Haram faction he currently leads.