Même pas peur! Ethnographies of Security in the Sahel

This issue of Mande Studies focuses on political crises and growing insecurity in the Sahel.¹ All articles are grounded on long-term engagement with the region, whether they are based on recent fieldwork to document state and civil society responses or use past fieldwork to critically examine narratives by security experts. The contributions offer nuanced understandings of the regional impact of national and international security and peacekeeping operations as well as how particular people experience and mediate growing insecurity and danger.

We take recent societal transformations and prevailing discourses about the security crisis as a point of departure for developing ethnographies of security. In this manner, we critically interrogate images of despair, pervasive violence, and lawlessness that widely circulate across a variety of media including maps, newspaper articles, travel advisories, reports by the UN and human rights organizations, and social media (de Jorio this issue; Hagberg this issue). Such narratives instill fear and anxiety, which contribute to the estrangement of the international community or, at most, the predominance of military solutions to address the crisis. Above all, they lead to the further isolation of regions and communities and the spread of terrorist operations, in the absence of viable political and economic alternatives (Hagberg this issue). Such narratives also construct the crisis as a mostly regional phenomenon, thus downplaying international actors’ and entities’ contributions to its ongoing development (de Jorio this issue; Merry 2009).

The crisis in the Sahel is not simply regional or national, but truly transnational, geopolitical, and global. The roots of this most recent wave of insecurity go back to the realignment of powers in the post-cold war era, the often devastating effects of neoliberal reforms, the war on terror, the Arab Spring, and most of all, the collapse of Libya following European and American intervention (Scott 2013). Qaddafi’s Libya was an autocratic and violent state, but Qaddafi’s removal from power further contributed to instability in the Sahel and beyond (Gberie 2018). The collapse of Libya led to the return to their countries of origin (Mali and Niger) of the Tuareg mercenaries who had served in Qaddafi’s armed forces, the increased availability of sophisticated weapons in the region, the reigniting of Tuareg’s irredentist aspirations, and the intensification in the activities of Salafi-Jihadi organizations (Lecocq et al. 2013). Qaddafi’s Libya was instrumental in countering the influence of reform Islam and Saudi Arabia and in supporting more moderate forms of Islam in the region (Ronen 2001, 2011; Holder 2014a, 2014b; de Jorio 2016). Of course, the troubles in the Sahel also have more local roots, in bad governance, socioeconomic and regional inequalities, and poverty (Brunet-Jailly et al. 2014; Hagberg et al. 2017; Konaté 2013). But the exclusion of global dynamics from many analyses of the security crisis obscures rather than clarifies what the crisis is about and contributes to Western estrangement from dynamics they do not perceive as their own.

International responses continue to have a significant impact on the region and have contributed to the escalation of conflict. The security crisis has led to a proliferation of actors and entities tasked with the securitization of the region, such as the United Nations, the African Union and the European Union, and the Economic Community of West African States. Their interventions reinforce Sahelian countries’ dependency on the Global North and complicate peace efforts, also due to the lack of coordination between these institutions’ initiatives (Wyss and Tardy 2019:7). Furthermore, the increase in military presence and weapons in the region have led to the militarization and escalation of interethnic conflicts as seen, for instance, in Mali (Benjaminsen & Ba 2018; Studio Tamani 2019). The movement of UN troops to contain terrorist activities in Mali has led to the relocation of these terrorist organizations in neighboring countries such as Burkina Faso (Hagberg et al. 2018, 2019) from which these groups have reorganized and staged their attacks, thus widening the areas involved in the conflict.

The articles here collected aim to capture the security crisis in the Sahel from the perspective of some of the people...