Short Abstract

This panel examines how jihadist insurgencies produce political order in relation to their spatial surroundings. Exerting control over routes, crossings, and everyday circulation becomes a means of making and contesting power. We investigate those contestations in and beyond African borderlands.

Long Abstract

The centrality of territorial control to the exercise of insurgent power is increasingly being challenged. The ability to open or close roads, regulate access to markets, levy passage fees, or restrict movement plays a crucial role in the making of political order. This panel examines how jihadist insurgencies reshape patterns of mobility and immobility, and how these practices are shaped in turn by existing social, political and spatial arrangements.

Rather than opposing circulation to territorial control, we ask how the regulation of movement—through ‘regimes of mobility’—becomes a way of exercising authority over people and places. Insurgents move through material routes and social nodal points already constituted through the practices of states, customary authorities, traders, transporters and local communities. Their interventions do not produce a single, uniform political order. Instead, rules of access, taxation, protection and passage are imposed, negotiated, circumvented and contested. Civilians navigate these overlapping arrangements, often under highly unequal conditions. Spatial surroundings are not passive; they structure these processes.

Bridging scholarship on jihadist insurgencies, rebel governance, mobility regimes and borderlands, the panel asks how changing conditions of movement reconfigure spatialised forms of power. We welcome empirically grounded contributions examining how people and goods move, according to which negotiated and contested rules, under whose (contested) authority, and with what consequences for insurgencies? Contributions that foreground the particularities of salafi-jihadist ideology and praxis in these processes are especially welcomed. Ethnographic, historical, comparative, and geospatial approaches are encouraged. Contributors may be invited to participate in a special issue.

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