Sao Tome and Principe

Unlikely (roughly 5–10%): São Tomé and Príncipe is expected to avoid direct involvement in significant armed conflict over the next three years, with risk concentrated in low-probability institutional breakdown scenarios rather than external war.

Risk remains very low, but politics looks noisier. The key variable is whether the Constitutional Court/assembly dispute is resolved through negotiated institutional off-ramps or hardens into a legitimacy crisis that pulls police/military units into partisan roles. Most likely outcomes are legal-political confrontation, protests, and isolated scuffles rather than sustained armed violence. Watch for arrests of senior opposition figures, mutiny rumors, or parallel chains of command.

Over five years, the main downside pathway is chronic fiscal stress and patronage competition interacting with weak judicial legitimacy, producing repeated constitutional crises and episodic coercion. Maritime crime and corruption could worsen governance but still rarely translate into organized armed conflict on small islands. Upside stabilizers include continued UN peacebuilding engagement, IMF-supported reforms, and routine electoral turnover. Interstate war remains highly unlikely absent a major external basing shock.

Scope and threshold This estimates the probability within three years of significant armed conflict: sustained organized violence involving state forces and an organized non-state actor, or interstate war involving São Toméan forces. Protests, criminality, piracy/armed robbery, and brief coup attempts are excluded unless they evolve into persistent organized fighting.

Threat drivers The main new risk signal is domestic-institutional: reporting indicates an acute separation-of-powers confrontation involving parliamentary maneuvers over the Constitutional Court and contested security actions affecting court access. This raises the probability of elite polarization, contested legality, and episodic coercion.

However, escalation to significant armed conflict would still require a difficult sequence: durable security-force fragmentation, formation of an organized armed faction, and sustained operations. São Tomé’s small scale and limited coercive capacity make short, elite-driven crises more plausible than prolonged armed campaigns.

External drivers remain weak. Regional instability in West/Central Africa has limited transmission to an offshore microstate without land borders. Maritime insecurity (trafficking, illegal fishing, episodic Gulf of Guinea armed robbery) can elevate corruption and localized violence, but it rarely generates territorially rooted insurgency on small islands.

Great-power courtship and defense cooperation signaling (including Russia-related reporting) can intensify information operations and domestic wedge politics, but the more likely outcome is diplomatic pressure and internal controversy, not kinetic entanglement.

Resilience and systemic firebreaks Geography is the dominant firebreak: insularity constrains arms/fighter inflows and sanctuary formation. Security forces are small and primarily oriented to internal order and maritime tasks, limiting both expeditionary exposure and the feasibility of sustained internal warfare. International engagement adds stabilizers: UN peacebuilding support around a national conflict-prevention strategy and IMF program conditionality that incentivizes institutional continuity.

Net assessment Compared with the baseline, risk ticks up due to visible institutional strain and the possibility of security-force politicization. Even so, the structural balance still strongly favors continuity of peace; the modal outlook is political crisis management, not organized armed conflict.