In the third in the series of “IntelBriefs” on African security issues being produced by the Atlantic Council’s Michael S. Ansari Africa Center in partnership with the Soufan Group, an international strategic consultancy, Ansari Center deputy director Bronwyn Bruton notes that important transitional arrangements were neglected before the independence of South Sudan last year and, as a result, the new country and the one from which it seceded are now waging a belated and predictably violent effort to allocate oil revenues and territory.

J. Peter Pham, director of the Atlantic Council’s Michael S. Ansari Africa Center, spoke at a Heritage Foundation event, Crisis in the Sahel: Bitter Fruit of the “Arab Spring.”

The Michael S. Ansari Africa Center hosted a visit today by a delegation from the African Centre for the Constructive Resolution of Disputes (ACCORD), led by its founder and executive director Vasu Gounden and accompanied by senior advisor Aziz Pahad, former Deputy Foreign Minister of the Republic of South Africa, and Ambassador Welile Nhlapo, National Security Advisor to South African President Jacob Zuma and Special Representative to the Great Lakes Region, as well as diplomats from the South African Embassy.

Less than a year after South Sudan declared its independence, it appears headed for war once again with its northern neighbor, Sudan. At the same time, marginalized northerners are rebelling against the government of Sudan’s president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir. The international community has called for a cease-fire and peace talks, but the return of violence is not necessarily a bad thing.

In “In Sudan, Give War a Chance,” an op-ed published in Saturday’s New York Times, Gérard Prunier, a senior fellow in the Atlantic Council’s Michael S. Ansari Africa Center, discusses the likelihood of war between South Sudan and Sudan as well as the growing conflict within Sudan between the Arab Islamist center and its black Muslim periphery.

J. Peter Pham, director of the Atlantic Council’s Michael S. Ansari Africa Center, was featured as an expert commentator in a France 5 television documentary on al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM).

The verdict delivered Thursday against Charles G. Taylor for crimes against humanity ends a saga that began on Christmas Eve 1989, when Mr. Taylor and a group of Libyan-trained followers invaded Liberia, igniting a regional conflagration that eventually engulfed parts of Sierra Leone, Guinea and Ivory Coast.

In “An Incomplete Justice,” an op-ed published in today’s New York Times, J. Peter Pham, director of the Atlantic Council’s Michael S. Ansari Africa Center, discusses former Liberian president Charles Taylor’s war crimes conviction by a UN-created tribunal at The Hague.

J. Peter Pham, director of the Atlantic Council’s Michael S. Ansari Africa Center, spoke today on “The Challenge of the Former Somalia” at the US Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

J. Peter Pham, director of the Atlantic Council’s Michael S. Ansari Africa Center, and senior fellow Rudolph Atallah were featured speakers on a panel following the Washington premiere of the film Fishing without Nets at the Newseum this evening.