Paper short abstract:

While armed violence did not initially affect the Massina region (Mali) during the 2012-2013 crisis, Jihadi insurgents have developed on early 2015 and have since managed to control parts of the region. This paper delves into local history to make sense of the rise of Jihadism in Central Mali.

Paper long abstract:

Après les trois régions du Nord, le centre du Mali est tombé dans une insécurité chronique dont les principaux acteurs seraient des pasteurs nomades majoritairement Peuls et ayant rejoint la lutte armée au sein de la Katibat Massina d'Ançardine, fondé par Hamadoun Koufa. Après la déroute subie à Diabaly en 14 janvier 2013 face aux troupes françaises de l'opération Serval, les radicaux qui avaient survécu se replièrent dans la forêt du Wagadou et dans le Méma. C'est pendant la transhumance de l'année 2013 que les éleveurs peuls du cercle croisèrent le chemin des moudjahidines dans leurs différentes zones de repli qui sont aussi les sites d'accueil des troupeaux du Delta pendant l'hivernage. Cette communication s'attache à décrire cette rencontre et à ne mesurer les suites.

Cette communication analyse plus précisément les raison qui ont poussé des groupes de pasteurs peuls à rejoindre la Katibat Massina et à y rester. Elle montre comment les conflits et les tensions préexistantes à l'arrivée du groupe de Hamadoun Koufa ont largement influencé les logiques d'affiliation à sa Katibat. En ce sens, l'engagement dans le Jihad, que celui-ci ait ou non une prétention globale, ne peut se comprendre sans une restitution fine des trames historiques locales.

Paper short abstract:

Using control of the natural resources of Lake Chad, Jihadi organisation ISWAP has built links to civilians, producing some form of statehood and drawing resources for its military successes. This process however comes with contradictions.

Paper long abstract:

Boko Haram has long been torn up by internal tensions. The greater pushback by the Nigerian state and allies from 2015 weakened the legitimacy of Boko Haram's leader Abubakar Shekau, giving dissenters an occasion to break away under the flag of the Islamic State in West Africa Province (ISWAP). Right after breaking away, ISWAP took over the area of Lake Chad, a vast rural area with prime resources - grazing lands, fertile land and fish. ISWAP has thought of itself, and has presented itself as more gentle than Shekau to civilians and to internal dissenters. It has claimed this more moderate attitude was theologically more correct. This paper, based on interviews with civilians familiar with the Lake and persons formerly associated with ISWAP, intends to explore the governance experience of ISWAP. There is ample evidence that ISWAP has behaved more gently than Shekau's faction. It has progressively become able to provide some services beyond gatekeeping the Lake resources. It is clear that this attitude has been politically more expedient, playing a part in ISWAP's consolidation of new networks and more solid resource bases, which have translated in greater military success. There are, however, some significant contradictions and tensions in ISWAP's governance - fine-tuning coercion is not easy, and trying to be more collegial can make it difficult to maintain coherence.

Paper short abstract:

The paper explores logics of militant engagement and defection within Jihadi groups as well as forms of local governance that Jihadi groups project on territories. The paper focusses on different Katiba or Jihadi groups of Central Sahel, more specifically Central Mali and the Mali-Niger Border.

Paper long abstract:

In the first part, this paper explores the way individuals chose to join (or are coerced into) Jihadi groups in different insurgency spots of Central Sahel (more specifically Central Mali and the Mali-Niger Border). Although it stresses how reconstructing individual trajectories help understand the complexity and diversity of militant engagements, it also raises questions about the limitations of field interviews as the exclusive or dominant source/methodology to make sense of Jihadi militancy. It points at the crucial need to re-contextualize individual trajectories into longer and broader historical dynamics to make sense of Jihadi recent expansion in central Sahel. Avoiding the clichés of Jihadi barbaric terror, the paper also explores some of the dilemmas that jihadi groups face with both intending to deploy their specific national/transnational agenda and trying to strengthen their local, recent and still fragile rural roots. Trajectories of voluntary membership or forced integration must also be analyzed in the light of these alternative governance processes and social and security regulation services that are proposed in these katibas to fill state failures or the weakening of traditional legitimacy. But listening to renegades and defectors formerly volunteers who run away from these katiba reveals just as much a disappointed range of expectations as the often multiple motivations that cross these initial adhesions including for example quests for more autonomy still unfulfilled or the desire to strengthen the micro-territorial sovereignty of the chiefdoms of origin of these militant.

Paper short abstract:

Northern Mozambique is facing a jihadi situation since October 2017. While a debate rages over its international connections and links to criminal networks, this presentation focuses on the origin and development of the movement before it turned to armed action.

Paper long abstract:

Northern Mozambique is facing a jihadi situation since October 2017. While a debate rages over its international connections and links to criminal network, this presentation focuses on the origin and development of the movement before it turned to armed action. The aim is to to understand the origin and project of the movement, so as to better understand its nature.

Paper short abstract:

Ce papier analyse les rhétoriques identitaires des groupes armés djihadistes et milices d'auto-défense et les répertoires qu'ils mobilisent (question foncière, sécurité villageoise, inertie de l'Etat central) dans le conflit au centre du Mali.

Paper long abstract:

La région inondée du delta intérieur du Niger et celle qu'on a pris l'habitude d'appeler « Pays Dogon », en contribuant par là-même à nourrir une identification entre territoire et population, connait depuis 2015 une violence à l'issue incertaine, qui n'était pas à l'ordre du jour lors des Accords d'Alger et qui pose des nouveaux défis au processus de paix.

La violence se manifeste sous différentes formes selon les acteurs qui y sont impliqués. Ce qui est nouveaux, c'est la naissance de milices à caractère « ethnique ». À la suite d'assassinats et d'agressions de paysans et membres de la confrérie des chasseurs dogon (Donson) par des « djihadistes » se réclamant des nomades Peuls, des groupes armés dogon se sont constitués ou reconstitués. Se proposant de défendre leurs communautés contre la violence djihadiste, et lutter pour sauvegarder l'intégrité des frontières nationales, ces derniers utilisent souvent des récits mythiques pour se donner une légitimité et une profondeur historique. À leur tour, les milices Peulhes produisent des récits identitaires justifiant leur révolte contre les notabilités sédentarisées, accusées de contrôler les ressources foncières et d'imposer une dynamique économique qui marginaliserait les pasteurs nomades et d'autres groupes subalternes.

On se propose ici d'analyser l'enjeu à reconnaître dans la toile de fond de ces rhétoriques identitaires, le signifié du discours sur les appartenances ethniques dans le cadre de l'État-nation, et les moyens par lesquels est mobilisée la « mémoire ethnique » des groupes concernés (chansons rituelles, épopées de certains personnages, etc.).

Paper short abstract:

The paper investigates the capacity of the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara to forge a constituency, mobilise an insurgency and govern a borderland through the harnessing of local grievances, identities and threat perceptions against Niger's hybrid counter-insurgency.

Paper long abstract:

While prominent scholarship has argued that jihadism can be interpreted as a particular form of insurgency (Duyvesteyn 2018; Kalyvas 2018), the explanations of the capacity of jihadi insurgencies to attract and mobilise recruits remains controversial. Recent findings have challenged the assumption that a lack of governance and limited state reach stimulates "radicalisation", especially in marginal areas and in poorly governed borderlands, highlighting instead the significance of the (perception of) abuses perpetrated by state authorities against marginal communities (ISS 2016; ICG 2017; Pellerin 2017; UNDP 2017). From this perspective, it is rather state action - and not the lack thereof - that contributes to explaining the capacity of mobilisation of jihadi insurgencies arising in African borderlands.

Investigating the complex interplay between the processes of jihadi mobilisation / rebel governance and the practices of counter-terrorism / state governance, the paper explores the rise, evolution and organisation of the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara (ISGS) in remote Niger's borderlands. Borrowing the analytical framework from constructivist approaches to civil war studies (Kalyvas and Balcells 2010), I argue that ISGS has harnessed local grievances to promote a transformation of identity and threat perceptions of cross-border communities. The blurring of the lines between state and non-state governance and security is intentionally aimed at reframing dynamics of contention and mobilisation in rural societies. The paper builds on extensive fieldwork carried out in 2017 and 2018 in Niger, including in Niamey and the region of Tillabéry.

Paper short abstract:

The paper analyses alternative sociabilities as part of survival strategies based on different forms of violence. In this context, Boko Haram appears as a sophisticated dispositive embedding multiple narratives of violence into the social network.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on the analysis of multiform logic of exclusions (economic, social and connected to the use of land), the paper proposes studying the construction and reconfiguration of alternative sociability. This sociability is part of livelihood and survival strategies of the displaced population in the southeastern region of Niger concerned by the Boko Haram insurgency.

Social Network Analysis allowed a graphical visualization of alternative networks, identifying specific categories of actors that are weakely connected (within an important "geodesic distance") to different kind of authorities (administrative, religious, customary or humanitarian. This population (e.g. prostitutes, drug deals/vendors, gasoline resellers etc.) is getting through diverse forms of violence, constitutive of alternative sociability. While the violence may be inflicted on the society, caused by the society or by the armed group, the paper shows the complexity and plurality of its interpretations. In this context Boko Haram is acting as a sophisticated dispositive by embedding diverse narratives of violence into the social network of the displaced population in the southeast of Niger. What kind of new identities these narratives are producing? What is the place of Boko Haram in the construction of alternative sociability?

The contribution drives from more than one hundred qualitative interviews conducted during the field research through 2017-2018 in the southeast of Niger.