Paper short abstract:

This presentation explores social movements opposed to the French presence in Senegal and Mali. It nuances their novelty and youth-only component, illustrates their variations (references, claims, organization) with respect to context and sheds light on activists’ career paths.

Paper long abstract:

While most eyes focus on “crisis” and its effects on the international order, this presentation takes activists' narratives and everyday actions as its point of departure. It explores social movements opposed to the French presence in Senegal, theatre of the first massive demonstrations and intellectual pole of the critique, and Mali, which has become its new epicenter. Grounded in more than 70 interviews carried out with activists, pioneers, and "doyens" in Bamako and Dakar in 2023 and 2024, it sheds light on the movements’ genealogies and the role of historical figures of anti-imperialism in both training and ongoing struggles. This enables us to nuance two of the main characteristics given to them in the media: their newness and their exclusive appeal to the “youth". Taking a comparative approach, we will demonstrate their commonalities, their variations regarding the registers of action, and the vocabulary of contestation, organisation, and structure, etc. Whereas there is a quite unified bloc of critiques and movements in "opposition" to the state in Senegal, in Mali these claims frequently align with the authorities and open possibilities of cooperation, which may explain the fragmentation of the Bamako movement. We will explore the development of alternative visions of the "crisis", the international responses to it, and recent political developments in Mali subsequent to the two coups d'état, which a group of actors interviewed consider to be a solution and a path for transformation.