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Paper short abstract:

How does smuggling affect the production of violence in the Sahelian conflict? I examine the different smuggling practices that armed groups engage in, and how they affect the violence perpetrated following four trends: strategic repertoire, frequency, target selection, and spatial displacement.

Paper long abstract:

How does smuggling affect the production of violence in conflict? We see smuggling happening at any time and yet, in wartime, it is associated with different conflict dynamics and outcomes in different places. After exploring what leads Violent Political Organizations (VPOs) operating in the Sahel to engage in certain smuggling practices, I examine how these interactions affect the violence perpetrated in the conflict following four trends: strategic repertoire, frequency, target selection, and spatial displacement. This project focuses on the ongoing conflict in the Sahel, specifically on VPOs operating in Mali and its borders with Algeria, Burkina Faso, Libya, and Niger. Looking at VPOs' internal social norms, I first establish their engagement with smuggling, ranging from contestation to collaborative practices. In cases like the Sahel, illegal markets branch out which increases the expected benefits from smuggling activity and is favorable to armed groups who may neither fight nor ally with one another. Then, I unpack the crime-violence nexus that led many scholars, analysts, and policymakers to describe smuggling as a security threat, both regionally and globally. There is very little evidence about whether smuggling directly generates or stabilizes violence in a conflict, such as transforming it into a high- or low-intensity conflict. This project relies on online content analysis, process tracing of the conflict and of illicit trade, social network analysis, and interviews with military officials, migrants, and bureaucrats. The collected data will be combined with existing data available on public academic databases such as ACLED, UCDP, IOM, and UNHCR.