Africanistan

Serge Michailof had an exceptional career as a development practitioner, successively preparing development projects in Latin America, South Asia, and North Africa in an engineering firm, managing technical teams in Africa and Asia for the French Development Agency (AFD) as country director and later as the head of operations, negotiating development programmes and policy reforms at the World Bank as a senior advisor and regional director. For ten years, he was an associate professor at the Paris School of International Affairs (Sciences Po) in Paris and the Sorbonne. He is currently an associate researcher at IRIS (Institut de Relations Internationales et Stratégiques), the leading think tank on geopolitics in Paris, and a senior fellow at the FERDI foundation (Fondation pour les Etudes et la Recherche en Développement International). He is a board member of the CIAN (Conseil des Investisseurs Français en Afrique) and the GRET (Groupe de Recherche et d'Echanges Technologiques), one of the leading French NGOs. He is a regular consultant on fragile states and post-conflict reconstruction, working for governments and international agencies, with a specific focus on institution- and state-building. During his 50-year carrier he has worked in 65 different countries on all continents. Serge Michailof studied in France (MBA at HEC, PhD in Economics, MA in Anthropology) and in the US (MIT).

List of Figures
Foreword by Paul Collier
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction

Part One: Sub-Saharan Africa: The End of Euphoria
1. The New Threats to Africa's Stability and Growth
2. Programmed Demographic Explosion in the Sahel?
3. Marginalization and Underemployment in Rural Africa
4. Will Africa Skip the Industrial Development Stage?

Part Two: Fragile States at the Eye of the Storm
5. What Causes Fragility in Certain States?
6. Weak Institutions Weaken Fragile States
7. The Ignored Fragility of Côte d'Ivoire and its Descent into Hell: 1980-2012

Part Three: Lessons the Sahel Can Draw from Afghanistan
8. Is the Sahel in the Process of Turning into a New Afghanistan?
9. Afghanistan-Lesson One: Security Cannot be Entrusted for Long to Foreign Forces
10. Afghanistan-Lesson Two: Aid Agencies Cannot be Left to Do as they Please
11. Afghanistan-Lesson Three: In fragile States, the Priority is to Build Modern, Efficient, Sovereign Institutions

Part Four: What Is to Be Done?
12. Applying the Lessons of the West's Failure in Afghanistan to the Sahel: Part 1
13. Applying the Lessons of the West's Failure in Afghanistan to the Sahel: Part 2

Conclusion
Epilogue: How the World Has Changed a Lot in Some Ways and Hardly At All In Others.
Afterword
Acknowledgements