Short Abstract

There are very few biographies of African jihadi leaders, fighters and thinkers. The panel aims at addressing this weakness by not only exploring cases but also comparing them to each other and reflect on what this can teach us

Long Abstract

While several Middle Eastern jihadi figures have been the object of important books, the biographical approach is still rare when it comes to sub-Saharan Africa. On the one hand, the archive is scarce and fieldwork difficult, so proper biographies are hard to develop. On the other hand, scholars have been mostly focused on broad processes, frequently driven by policy concerns - violence, war economies, displacement, links to the global jihadist franchises and the like. When individuals appear, it is often as blips in questionnaire-based investigations. The panel proposes researchers to follow individual militant trajectories over a significant period of time. The use of tools and notions classic to the study of individuals engaged in social movements and to other traditions of the social sciences – for instance, career, commitment, socialisation, capital, subjectification – can help shed new light on African jihadisms. The present panel thus proposes to analyse a series of biographies of African jihadi figures, based on rich original primary sources. The panel welcomes contributions on the grandees of African jihadism – the ideologues, founders and leaders – but also on the middle rank (an echelon that Alex Thurston has usefully called attention to) and on the rank-and-file: followers, men and female, “street-level” operatives, whose “navigations” have a lot to teach us. A biographical turn might help us unlock some of the issues and debates, including the global-local relation that has agitated the sub-field in recent years.

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