ABSTRACT
From a low point during the 1990s after the end of the Cold War, African navies have experienced a general though not unproblematic period of renewed importance during the early twenty-first century. This has resulted from increased maritime security challenges in African waters during the 2000s and 2010s such as piracy, insurgency, illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing, people trafficking and drug smuggling. In the early twenty-first century, Africa’s navies possess a wide range of capabilities from those of regional powers like Egypt and South Africa which have some open-ocean potential to the navies of Nigeria, Ghana and Kenya which navigate their full territorial and sometimes regional waters, to the many that operate only in their own coastal waters and inland waterways. Over the past 20 years, African navies have developed in the context of the increasing interest and presence in African waters by non-African navies that mount multi-national naval operations and exercises, establish naval bases on the African coast and sponsor their African counterparts.
