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Accepted Paper:
Nostalgia for the state in the postcolonial Sahel
Souleymane Diallo
(University of Münster)
This paper argues that the narratives of crisis deflect our attention from some poorly understood productive dynamics structuring the volatile security situation in the Sahelian region.
Paper long abstract:
Over the past decade, most scholarly and media representations of contemporary Islamic militancy across the Sahel and the global war on terror that seeks to contain it, have been marked by widespread narratives of crisis. This paper takes a different route. It argues that these narratives deflect our attention from some poorly understood productive dynamics structuring the volatile security situation in the Sahelian region. To this end, this paper asks: is the Sahel in crisis or else is the normative perspective on the Sahel in crisis? To address this question, I, firstly, reflect on the limitation of the notion of crisis as an analytical category in this context. Secondly, I propose an alternative perspective that helps rethink the epistemologies of the state in postcolonial Sahel. I situate this discussion within the scholarship on “law and disorder in the postcolony.”