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Paper short abstract:

Debates about the global or local constitution of African jihadi groups hinge on the question of financing. Contra sensationalist accounts, this paper highlights more commonplace sources of jihadi group funding in the central Sahel, but still demonstrates the centrality of regionalized connectivity.

Paper long abstract:

One of the central questions informing contemporary debates about jihadi groups operating in Africa and their purported global connections relates to how they finance their organizations and networks. For several years, governments, international organizations, NGOs and think tanks, and diverse security experts have advanced the existence of a crime-terror nexus that facilitates jihadi group operations across international borders. This paper critiques the more sensationalist tendencies of this discourse by focusing on the nature of illicit practices implemented by jihadi groups in the Mali-Niger borderlands. While the imaginary of the crime-terror nexus focuses on trans-continental drug-trafficking (cocaine), enrichment from natural resources (gold), or kidnapping for ransom (Western expatriates), the central Sahel's war economies entail far more routine and commonplace resources and practices. The paper examines the three most important illicit practices that inform the central Sahel's war economies: the violent extraction of livelihood resources (especially cattle); racketeering (targeting regional businessmen); and fines for non-observance of jihadi group rules. While these practices constitute the most significant sources of income for groups like the Islamic State in the Sahel Province (ISSP), given their tenuous and inconsistent nature of their terroritorial control, jihadi groups in the central Sahel must still regionalize their financing operations by leveraging connections across West African borders. In this sense, the paper cuts a middle road between more grandiose and global-oriented discourses of connections linking criminal and terrorist behaviour, and micro-level discourses and epistemological positions that have eschewed more transnational explanations.