Paper short abstract:

Amidst military coups and attempted counter-coups, Burkina Faso's social media landscape has become a key site of polarization and spectacular information leaks. This paper traces these new dynamics in line with A. Mbembe's "society of enmity" (2016) and contemporary debates on conspiracy theories.

Paper long abstract:

The “desire for an enemy,” writes Achille Mbembe (2016:26), has become the sine qua non of our “eminently political epoch” and its “dominant affective tonality.” Threats appear everywhere and privilege “a logic of suspicion where everything must be seen as secret or as belonging to a plot or conspiracy” (ibid.). A particularly dramatic manifestation of such a politics of suspicion unfolds in contemporary Burkina Faso. On top of the Sahel’s regional crisis of banditry and Islamic terrorism, and amidst numerous successful, attempted and alleged coups, new dynamics of polarization have emerged, opposing especially the MPSR2 military government’s supporters and critics. While people on the streets of the capital Ouagadougou have become increasingly careful what to say in the presence of whom, Burkinabè social media is replete with allegations, information leaks, propaganda and hate speech against internal and external “enemies” from either side. In this paper, I focus on the Facebook accounts of Ibrahima Maïga, Henri Sebgo, and Anonymous Élite Alpha as the theatrical stages of this contemporary political conflict. Based on interviews and ethnographic fieldwork in 2023 and 2024, I focus on two key characteristics of such political conflict: the significance of information leaks as a political instrument and the uncertainty of who is who as a defining parameter of blurred spaces between real and virtual politics. The empirical observations are theorized in line with Achille Mbembe’s “society of enmity” (2016) and contemporary debates about fake news and conspiracy theories in the global north.