The Political Economy of Ransoming in the Sahel: The History, the Ethics and the Practice

Introduction

This paper is part of larger project that is concerned with social, political, cultural and ideological processes that underpin ongoing transformations in the Sahel. It is particularly interested in the economic basis of violence, radicalized forms of militant engagement and shifting identities in the context of contested governance models. Specifically, it examines “ransoming” as a framework and a practice that articulates a particular view of the use, or threat of violence for political, ideological and economic aims. There has been an increasingly powerful constellation of disparate and related groups that operate in the Sahelian region under a political economy of violence. Their claims for social justice or cultural particularism intersect with demands of essentialist variants of Islam, and these are couched in a militant language that obscures more than it reveals about the operating procedures, the actors and institutions involved. But their claims are also about reviving fading modes of governance in a context whereby “traditional” trading structures and collective forms of resource management and distribution have been fundamentally disrupted.

The kidnapping and smuggling economy however adds an element of banditry with serious political repercussions that threaten to destabilize the whole region. Between 2003 and 2013, al Qaeda in the Maghreb (AQIM) is said to have kidnapped between 50 and 100 Westerners. Unknown until the late 1990s, AQIM has become a formidable power with which Sahelian governments and societies now have to contend. If its radicalism and its proselytizing methods have elicited the strongest rejection from governments and civilians, it has succeeded in attracting scores of budding militants from the Sahel and elsewhere. The successful kidnapping economy has inspired in turn the emergence of satellite terrorist groups across the Sahel, namely the Mouvement pour l’Unicité et le Jihad en Afrique de l’Ouest (MUJAO), Al Qaeda in the Sahel and Al Qaeda in Black Africa. Some of these groups have been able to bankroll their operations through ransom money.

My contention is that ransoming, like razzia, raiding, piracy and similar practices exists and operates within models of intelligibility that get easily flattened in the way we often frame our research questions.² This paper thus seeks to examine ransoming practices in the Sahel in light of historical practices ranging from raiding, razzia, and piracy in order to revisit the principles, modes, models of property, interchange and reciprocity that have shaped an ecological region and historical context marked by scarcity, precariousness and instability.

Historically, raiding practices served many purposes. Firstly, they were deployed alongside many modalities of governance in an ecological context characterized by scarcity, the unpredictability of the elements, and the harshness of the climate. Secondly, they constituted a pivotal instrument to centralizing processes, territorial expansion, and to attempts to force scattered, rebellious groups under the fold of emerging states. Razzia in particular functioned as a vector of regulation and restoration of an ethics of interchange often subject to the vagaries of contingency and the effects of unequal material capacity. Ultimately, in a context whereby theological interpretations of rights are imbricated with political desires for autonomy and dissension, boundaries between the legal, the licit and the legitimate depend on a rather conditional language. In fact, “legality” as a source of analytic certainty has long served to buttress state claims for violence while marginalizing often genuine political and economic claims. Raiding and ransoming strategies have thus been used as acts of defiance, as a form of adaptation to, and a response to various social strains heightened by capitalism, the disruption of traditional trading and economic circuits, and ultimately as a political weapon.

Raiding, Ransoming, Razzia: Historical and Contemporary Iterations

Home to pastoralists, herders, agriculturalists, caravan traders, the Saharan-Sahelian region has historically been a zone of encounter, transition, cultural and commercial exchange, a place where Tuareg, Arab, Tubu, Songhay, Djerma, Kanuri, Berber, etc. have historically cohabited, traded and interacted. A long history of exchange reinforces the cohesiveness of the Sahara-Sahel zone as a distinct region bound by historical ties and by contemporary events, as well as by linguist, cultural, religious, and economic factors...