Information Warfare as “Terrorism”: A New Legal Frontier in Africa
Security services in Nigeria’s seat of power and elsewhere will be watching the Angolan verdict closely, and some will be tempted to reach for counter-terrorism statutes the next time they detect a foreign hand stirring domestic unrest.
By Iyabo Aina An Angolan court has just sent two men to prison for terrorism, on the strength of paid social media posts, cultivated political contacts and a disinformation campaign allegedly designed to shake a government ahead of an election.
The more honest framing is that disinformation and hybrid warfare probably do belong somewhere in the national security conversation, but the tools used to fight them need their own carefully bounded legal architecture; specific cyber and foreign-interference statutes with clear evidentiary standards, rather than the blunt instrument of terrorism law, which was built for violence, not narratives.
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