Paper long abstract:

Burkina Faso has become a new epicenter of political turbulence in the Sahel. Islamist groups fuel violence and intercommunal conflict in order to destabilize the country. In 2019, death numbers in Burkina Faso reached a new peak. National security institutions and international interventions are unable to contain the spiral of violence or provide human security. In the midst of these developments, the nation-wide self-defense groups called the Koglweogos, who govern crime by their own means, have firmly installed in the country. While the international community accuses them to violate human rights, empirical findings stress that they enjoy trust in the population and have contributed to a significant drop in crime rates.

Vigilante governance in Africa always raised political and moral controversies. Actors like the Koglweogos navigate in legal and moral grey zones, reproduce violence to establish security, and thereby create tensions but also prejudices on various intertwined levels. Our research aims to achieve a decolonized perspective on the issue. This requires a deep anthropological immersion into the Koglweogos' governance and lifeworlds; an endeavor that is promising and at the same time highly challenging. Obstacles are multiple and appear on various levels. On the (inter)national level, where the Koglweogos are framed as an ethnic local militia and oftentimes scapegoated, research with the groups means to constantly swim against the tide of Eurocentric reports and media coverage. On the academic level, the goal to participate in the Koglweogos' everyday and during their extra-legal hearings raises severe ethical and methodological concerns. Not for nothing have anthropologists rarely conducted close observations with vigilantes. Last but not least, it is exactly these close observations on the ground, together with the Koglweogos and in the face of physical punishments, prisons, and shackled persons, that confront us with personal and professional limits. In addition, the security situation in Burkina Faso is fragile, which shrinks spaces of maneuvers during fieldwork and demands a lot of precautions.

This paper tackles the ethical, methodological and epistemological challenges we face before, during and after research with the Koglweogos. It reflects new directions for fieldwork in 'red areas' and puts an emphasis on the - surprisingly - hardest predicament we find: to counter simplified representations and norms that determine the way the world delineates political non-state actors in Africa.

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