The jihadi insurgency in Mozambique: origins, nature and beginning

Abstract

For the last three years, Mozambique has been facing an insurgency in its northern province of Cabo Delgado. There is much confusion and debate as to what is going on. Who are the insurgents, what do they want, and where do they come from? Debates have focused particularly on the role of religion and the external dimension of the insurgency. Drawing on fieldwork from 2018 and 2019, this paper focuses on the first attack of the insurgents in October 2017 and uses this to explore the origin, nature and early history of the contemporary armed violence. It uncovers that the insurgents belong to an Islamist sect which began a decade earlier and shifted to armed jihadism in the mid-2010s.