Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses the militarization of police forces in Mali and Côte d’Ivoire, situating Goita’s 2022 decision to re-militarize Mali’s police. I argue that across regime types, the militarization of security forces represents a mode of security governance principally aimed at regime survival.

Paper long abstract:

In October 2022, Assimi Goita’s military junta returned Mali’s police to a militarized statute, which had been a civilian force since 1991. While the junta argued that the main purpose was to employ police more effectively in the fight against jihadists alongside army and gendarmerie, Mali’s police unions interpreted the decision as a strategy to curtail their influence, marking a further shrinking of Mali’s civic space. In this paper, I compare Mali’s case to that of its neighbor Côte d’Ivoire, where the police has been a military-civilian hybrid force since the 1970s, equally eliminating the police union. I show that in both cases, the militarization has only marginal effects on the police’s mode of delivering security while allowing effective top-down governance of the institution. Although Côte d’Ivoire’s government largely adheres to democratic principles while Mali’s military junta displays clear authoritarian tendencies, I argue that the militarization of civilian security forces must in both cases be understood as a mode of militarized security governance that principally aims at regime survival. This highlights the appeal of militarization across different regime types in West Africa. The findings presented in this paper are based on primary data gathered through field work and remote interviews in Côte d'Ivoire and Mali. The discussion will be rooted in a historical analysis of civil-military relations in both countries’ post-colonial statebuilding processes.