Paper short abstract:

Drawing on recent fieldwork, the paper examines popular understandings of crisis, sovereignty, and Pan-Africanism in the Western Sahel. It argues that Sahelian ideas about what constitutes sovereignty evoke a will to contest postcolonial hierarchies through security partnership diversification.

Paper long abstract:

Crisis in the Sahel has become a byword in international policy circles, evoking terrorist threats, illegal migration, transnational organized crime, climate change, humanitarian needs, among others. Yet, discourses about the depth and breadth of the multifaceted crises which Sahelian populations face are far from fixed. Indeed, they are inherently productive and malleable, becoming entangled with other narratives that seek to rethink and reconfigure the plight of the Sahel, and the international hierarchies in which Sahelian states are embedded. This paper examines popular understandings of sovereignty and Pan-Africanism in the Sahel as advanced by the military governments of Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger and their supporters. It argues that sovereignty should not be understood in terms of international recognition, as conventional International Relations thinking proposes, nor as a measure of territorial control as advanced by some Political Scientists. Instead, discourses about sovereignty and Pan-Africanism in the Sahel draw inspiration from a will to contest postcolonial hierarchies and to shed off an assumed dominance of Western liberal international standards and practices (notably regarding democracy and human rights). These discourses produce exclusionary practices and effects that upend liberal notions of citizenship and belonging, and find resonance in the diversification of security partnerships and the outsourcing of state violence to alternative international partners. Nevertheless, the paper shows that these discourses and associated practices cannot shake off the coloniality of modern sovereignty, which fall hardest on individuals that are deemed to transgress the Sahel's desired advancement as articulated by its military-led transitional governments.