The Shifting Sands of the Sahel

How the recent anti-government offensive in Mali reflects the struggle of post-colonial governance

On April 25th 2026, the Azawad Liberation Front (FLA) and the al-Qaeda affiliate Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM) launched the largest coordinated military offensive in Mali since the Tuareg rebellion of 2012. Defence Minister Sadio Camara was killed, Kidal fell within days, JNIM declared a total siege of Bamako, and Russia"s Africa Corps suffered its most visible battlefield setback since deploying in 2021. Within a week, Africa Corps and Malian Armed Forces (FAMa) troops had abandoned the military base outside Tessalit, the northernmost bastion of state authority in Mali. Niger’s junta accused France of directly sponsoring the offensive; Paris denied the charge. The United Nations expressed their concern over civilian protection; hundreds of thousands were displaced and already stretched food supply chains weakened further.

Flag of Azawad - Credit: ISAO

The temptation is to read these events as a geopolitical shock produced in an ungoverned periphery. However, the offensive of April 2026 is a symptom — the latest expression of structural processes accumulating since Malian independence in 1960: the failure of the postcolonial state to convert inherited territory into a legitimate political community; the persistence of Tuareg statelessness as a condition imposed by post-colonial borders; the mutation of jihadist insurgency from an imported ideology into an organic governance alternative for communities abandoned by Bamako; the arithmetic of great-power competition that has substituted one form of external dependency for another without transforming the underlying crisis; and the compounding pressures of climate change, demographic stress, and a political economy of illicit trafficking that render persistent armed conflict locally rational.

The central claim is expressed by Frantz Fanon: the postcolonial state in Mali has reproduced colonial spatial hierarchy. Authority, aid, and recognition are concentrated in the administrative capital, while the interior is governed intermittently through garrisons, checkpoints, and punitive expeditions. Max Weber’s foundational definition of the state as the institution that successfully claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory remains an aspiration. In northern and central Mali, the monopoly is fragmented, legitimacy is rivalrous, and armed groups compete to govern.

A map of election regions in Mali - Credit: Minusma

The Tuareg: Statelessness as Political Condition

The Tuareg are a Berber-speaking, predominantly nomadic people whose traditional territory – Azawad – spans the central Sahara across Mali, Niger, Algeria, Libya, and Burkina Faso. Their population, estimated at between three and five million, is organised around clan confederations. The borders drawn at Malian independence in 1960 were a result of the Franco-colonial legacy that severed Tuareg pastoral circuits and placed their heartland under a southern, Bambara-dominated political centre in Bamako. There have been four major Tuareg rebellions: in the 1960s, the 1990s, 2006–2009, and the pivotal 2012 uprising. Each followed the same structural rhythm – negotiated settlement, promises of autonomy, failed implementation, renewed grievance.

A map of the Tuareg areas of inhabitation - Credit: Copyright © 2014  Nathan E. McCormack and Charles G. Thomas

Azawad is a political claim anchored in a lived economic reality. The routes connecting sub-Saharan West Africa to North Africa and the Mediterranean passed through Tuareg-controlled territory for centuries; tolls, protection services, and the trade in salt, gold, slaves, and livestock constituted the material basis of Tuareg political authority. Francesco Strazzari"s analysis of the Sahel demonstrates that this customary system of rights of passage was a formalised institution regulating territorial authority, extracting tribute, and providing protection along caravan corridors. Tuareg territorial claims were historically grounded in a relational economy of protection and passage — one that the collapse of the caravan trade and the imposition of colonial borders systematically destroyed.

The borders drawn at Malian independence in 1960 were the residue of Franco-colonial administrative mapping that divided a single social and economic zone among five successor states. The Malian state that inherited this geography was, from its formation, a southern state. Bamako, situated on the Niger River in the far southwest of the country, was the administrative centre — close to the railway from Dakar, manageable from the metropolitan perspective, surrounded by the dense agricultural population of the Bambara and Mandé heartland. The north was, from the beginning, an administrative afterthought: vast, expensive to administer, sparsely populated, and ethnically distinct. 

Hannah Arendt"s diagnosis of the stateless person — someone whose "right to have rights" has been structurally withdrawn by the international order — applies with particular force to Tuareg communities. The Tuareg were not stateless by cultural choice or incapacity; they were rendered stateless by a colonial cartography that parcelled their single social and economic world among states that had no prior claim to govern them, and whose postcolonial successors reproduced that exclusion.

Before 2012, Tuareg attempts to assert independence or even durable autonomy repeatedly failed. The Malian state was too weak to govern the north effectively, but too sovereignly invested in territorial unity to concede meaningful self-rule. The first rebellion of 1963–64 was crushed militarily by Modibo Keïta"s government, establishing a pattern in which northern dissent was treated less as a political claim than as a security threat. The 1990s rebellion produced the Tamanrasset Accords and later the National Pact, promising decentralisation, military integration, and development for the north, but implementation depended on a state that lacked both administrative capacity and political trust. 

Tuareg fighters were absorbed into the army unevenly; development funds were delayed, diverted, or captured by local intermediaries; and southern political elites feared that genuine autonomy would invite partition. The 2006–09 rebellion followed the same logic: accords offered symbolic recognition and limited integration, but not a credible transfer of coercive, fiscal, or administrative authority. For Tuareg movements, therefore, peace agreements demobilised armed groups without transforming the structure that produced rebellion. For Bamako, implementing autonomy threatened the fiction of a unified postcolonial state; for Tuareg actors, accepting partial decentralisation meant legitimising the very state whose authority over Azawad they contested.

The 2012 rebellion was catalysed by the collapse of Gaddafi"s Libya, where thousands of Tuareg fighters returned south heavily armed, forming the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA). Within months they had seized Kidal, Gao, and Timbuktu, proclaiming an independent State of Azawad – recognised by no state, yet marking a permanent rupture of Malian territorial integrity in the north. Beginning in the 1970s, Gaddafi pursued a deliberate strategy of recruiting Sahelian Tuareg into Libyan military and paramilitary structures, partly as an ideological project — Gaddafi envisaged a pan-Saharan Arab-Berber alliance — and partly as a practical instrument of Libyan regional influence. Severe droughts in 1969–73 and again in 1983–85 had already driven Tuareg communities into labour migration; the collapse of the caravan economy and the failure of Malian and Nigerien states to provide alternative livelihoods made Libya’s oil wealth an irresistible pull. These were not "Libyan Tuareg" in any settled sense; they were Malian and Nigerien Tuareg whose political subjectivity had been shaped by decades of exile, whose loyalties to Bamako had been extinguished by neglect and repression, and whose practical ties to their home states had been severed by distance, drought, and displacement.

Gaddafi formalised this relationship by creating the Islamic Legion, incorporating thousands of Tuareg fighters from Mali, Niger, and Chad. They received military training, wages, weapons, and the institutional experience of organised armed force — resources the Malian and Nigerien states had consistently denied them. When the NATO-backed uprising against Gaddafi began in February 2011 and the regime collapsed by October, this Tuareg military class returned south, bringing weapons, vehicles, military organisation, and political determination that transformed the balance of power in northern Mali almost overnight. The MNLA — the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad, formally founded in October 2011 — was for the first time capable of sustained offensive operations against Malian Armed Forces, whose own institutional degradation, compounded by decades of corruption and neglect, had left them catastrophically unprepared.

By 2026, the MNLA"s successor, the Azawad Liberation Front (FLA), is led by Alghabass Ag Intalla — the amenokal of the Ifoghas confederation and son of the late Intalla Ag Attaher, whose death in 2014 transferred both spiritual authority and political legitimacy to the younger generation of Tuareg leadership. It is this force that coordinated with JNIM to recapture Kidal during the April offensive, seizing the military base outside Tessalit by 1 May as Russia"s Africa Corps and FAMa troops withdrew under sustained combined pressure. The town is the symbolic heartland of Tuareg resistance — the one urban centre that Bamako never fully controlled even at the height of the 2015 Algiers peace process — and its fall to the FLA-JNIM axis constitutes a material demonstration that the Malian state"s territorial sovereignty in the north is no longer a diplomatic fiction to be managed, but an empty claim. 

The Tuareg cause at this juncture is best read through Achille Mbembe"s conception of the postcolony: the active refusal of a people to be governed by a state apparatus that remains, in its administrative logic, its ethnic composition, and its spatial imagination, ontologically foreign to their social world. It is, in Mbembe’s terms, a contestation of the very categories through which authority is legitimised and life is administered. Hannah Arendt"s diagnosis of the stateless person sharpens this further: Tuareg communities were not stateless through any absence of political organisation, but were rendered stateless by a specific act of colonial violence whose postcolonial heirs reproduced the exclusion without inheriting the metropolitan power that originally enforced it. The right to have rights, in Arendt’s formulation, requires membership in a political community capable of guaranteeing those rights. For the Tuareg, that community has never coherently existed.

What makes the present conjuncture particularly volatile — and analytically irreducible to either a jihadist insurgency or a separatist conflict — is the tactical alliance between the FLA and JNIM: a Tuareg nationalist front whose ultimate horizon is secular self-determination and an affiliate of al-Qaeda whose ultimate horizon is an Islamic emirate governed by sharia. History suggests the alliance is inherently unstable: in 2012, the MNLA’s initial military successes were rapidly eclipsed by its jihadist partners, who imposed governance structures — banning music, destroying Sufi shrines in Timbuktu, establishing sharia courts — that were anathema to the predominantly moderate and syncretic religious practice of Tuareg communities. The post-offensive period is likely to reproduce this tension. 

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari"s concept of the war machine — a nomadic force constituted outside and against the state apparatus defined by the continuous production of movement, intensity, and deterritorialisation — provides the most incisive analytic for understanding why Tuareg armed movements repeatedly reconstitute themselves after each failed settlement. The war machine is a social formation, a mode of collective existence that the state cannot permanently capture or assimilate precisely because its logic is incommensurable with the state"s logic of fixed territory, sedentary population, and administrative legibility. Each peace agreement — Tamanrasset, the National Pact, Algiers — attempted to transform the war machine into a state apparatus through integration, demobilisation, and institutional absorption. The FLA’s reconstitution as a coherent military force in 2025–26, and its willingness to ally tactically with a jihadist network it would ideologically oppose in any stable political settlement, is precisely the dynamic Deleuze and Guattari described: the war machine does not require ideological coherence; it requires only the continued existence of a state apparatus against which to define itself.

The Language of the Agreements

The structural weakness of the agreements is clearest in their own language. The 1991 Tamanrasset Accord was framed as an "Agreement on ceasing of hostilities": it ended “military operations and all armed action,” stabilised rebel forces in their “current places of billeting,” and required the Malian Armed Forces to undertake a “progressive reduction” in the sixth and seventh regions. Its strongest provisions concerned military restraint — the army would “disengage from the running of the civil administration” and avoid “zones of pasture land and densely populated zones.” Yet this language demilitarised the north without creating a northern political authority. 

The National Pact of 1992 used more ambitious language, promising “total integration” of MFUA combatants into “state uniformed units,” a “major withdrawal” of armed forces, and a ten-year "special development programme." But the decisive limitation was embedded in the wording: the special army units were still tasked only with "maintaining the integrity and external security of the national territory," and the development programme had to be "approved by the Government." Implementation was guaranteed by the parties’ "good faith" rather than by any binding transfer of sovereignty. This was the architecture of impossibility: the agreements promised specificity without sovereignty, integration without independent coercive power, and decentralisation without fiscal or constitutional self-rule.

The 2006 Algiers Accord and the 2015 Agreement on Peace and Reconciliation replicated this formula in more elaborate administrative form. The 2015 Agreement recognised "the need for governance which recognises the geo-historical and socio-cultural specificities of the North" and promised an institutional architecture enabling northern populations to "manage their own affairs." Article 1 simultaneously reaffirmed "respect for the national unity, territorial integrity and sovereignty of the State of Mali," while defining Azawad only as a "socio-cultural reality" compatible with "the unitary character of the Malian state." For Bamako, implementing autonomy threatened the fiction of a unified postcolonial state; for Tuareg actors, accepting partial decentralisation meant legitimising the very state whose authority over Azawad they contested.

The Jihadist Landscape: Al-Qaeda, ISIS, and the Mutation of JNIM

The jihadist presence in the Sahel is an ecosystem. The dominant force is Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM), formed in 2017 through the merger of Ansar Dine, Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), the Macina Liberation Front (Katiba Macina), and Al-Mourabitoun. Its leader, Iyad Ag Ghali – a Tuareg aristocrat who converted to Salafist Islam under Saudi influence in the 1990s — sits at the precise intersection of ethnic separatist politics and transnational jihadism. Initially focused on rural safe-havens and attrition attacks on isolated military posts, by 2025 it had transitioned to a sophisticated politico-military blockade strategy, strangling Bamako by controlling supply routes from Senegal, Mauritania, Guinea, and Côte d"Ivoire. A fuel blockade imposed in September 2025 crippled governmental logistics. A truce signed in late March 2026, which resulted in the release of one hundred JNIM prisoners in exchange for lifting the blockade,was spectacularly shattered by the April offensive.

The geographic distribution of jihadist influence across Mali varies greatly. In the Ménaka region and along the Niger-Mali border, where IS-SP has established its primary operational footprint, the ethnic landscape differs significantly from the Katiba Macina heartland of central Mali. Ménaka is dominated by Tuareg Idaksahak and Daoussahak communities, as well as Fulani and Tuareg Imghad groups, many of whom developed acute grievances against JNIM specifically because of the latter's predatory taxation of transhumance routes and artisanal mining operations, and its practice of imposing governance structures experienced as ethnically alien. 

Military situation in Mali and neighboring countries as of 30 April 2026 - Credit:: ACLED Data

IS-SP has consistently denounced JNIM"s al-Qaeda affiliation and its cooperation with the "nationalist and democratic" FLA as a betrayal of salafi-jihadi principles. Yet IS-SP launched its own opportunistic attacks from 28 April, exploiting the chaos to target government positions in Ménaka. The broader pattern illustrates a dynamic Paul Collier and others have identified in resource-contested conflict environments: as climate stress contracts viable pastoral land and as artisanal gold deposits become critical survival resources, competition between ethnic communities over grazing corridors, water sources, and mining sites intensifies. Armed groups that can credibly offer protection of these resources — rather than merely ideological affiliation — gain recruits and territorial authority. Jihadist geography in Mali is therefore best understood as the crystallisation of pre-existing ethnic and resource tensions into organised armed form.

JNIM"s Katiba Macina has drawn disproportionately from Fulani communities in central Mali — communities facing land dispossession, social exclusion, and collective punishment by Malian security forces. The Fulani–Dogon inter-communal violence of 2019–2021, in which Malian security forces were widely perceived to side with Dogon self-defence groups against Fulani communities, demonstrated that the Malian state would protect some ethnic communities against others, transforming JNIM affiliation from an ideological choice into a rational protection strategy. The ethnicisation of conflict — in which state counterinsurgency becomes indistinguishable from ethnic violence, and jihadist recruitment becomes indistinguishable from community self-defence — is among the most dangerous dynamics in the Malian theatre, and one that makes any simple military solution self-defeating.

Olivier Roy's influential distinction between the “Islamisation of radicalism” and the “radicalisation of Islam” offers a productive analytical lens for the Sahelian context. Roy, a French political scientist and major scholar of political Islam, secularisation, and jihadist violence, developed this argument against explanations that treat jihadist mobilisation primarily as the product of doctrinal Islamic radicalisation. He instead argues that many contemporary jihadists are first shaped by social rupture, generational rebellion, marginality, and political alienation; Islamism then supplies the symbolic grammar through which these grievances are articulated.

Why Conflict Persists: Structural Conditions

The longevity of Sahelian conflict requires investigating what Pierre Bourdieu would call structural violence: the slow, durable, largely invisible coercions that make certain populations perpetually vulnerable to the spectacular violence of armed conflict. Mali is ranked among the five least developed countries on Earth by the Human Development Index (position 188 of 193, UNDP 2024). Its agricultural heartland is under severe and accelerating desertification. The Lake Chad basin, once a regional economic anchor, has lost more than ninety percent of its surface area since 1963, displacing an estimated 2.4 million people and eliminating the pastoral livelihoods of millions more, according to the IPCC"s Sixth Assessment Report. Climate stress systematically liquidates the coping strategies — transhumance, diversified pastoral circuits, seasonal migration — that have historically mediated inter-ethnic tension, forcing competition for diminishing resources into direct confrontation.

A second structural driver that receives inadequate attention in Western commentary is the political economy of illicit trade. Strazzari's micro-level analysis demonstrates that the displacement of narcotics supply lines to the Sahara-Sahel region after increased interdiction on other global routes fundamentally transformed the political economy of armed group formation in northern Mali. UNODC estimated that cocaine worth approximately $1 billion transited West Africa annually at the height of the trade in 2009, generating protection revenues that dwarfed all legitimate economic activity in the north. The political economy of artisanal gold mining compounds this dynamic. Mali is West Africa's third-largest gold producer, with formal output of 66 tonnes in 2023, but the informal sector is estimated to produce an equivalent or greater volume. JNIM taxes artisanal mining operations extensively; Africa Corps reportedly receives access to gold concessions as partial operational payment from the junta. The gold economy thus simultaneously finances the insurgency and the counterinsurgency — a structural contradiction that renders sustainable resolution extraordinarily difficult.

Mali's population exceeded 23 million by 2026, more than double its 1960 figure, with a median age below seventeen and a youth unemployment rate estimated above forty percent in urban centres (ILO, 2024). JNIM recruits through economic incorporation: fighters receive salaries, social protection, and institutional belonging that the Malian state cannot provide. The IMF noted in its 2023 Article IV consultation that Mali"s per capita government expenditure on social services had declined in real terms since the 2021 coup, while military expenditure as a share of GDP increased from 2.9% to 5.1% — a resource allocation that precisely mirrors Fanon’s description of the postcolonial state prioritising coercion over service provision.

France, Russia, and the New Great Game

France's century-long presence in the Sahel constitutes one of the most consequential postcolonial relationships in contemporary geopolitics, and its unravelling since 2021 has created the precise vacuum into which Russia has moved. Operation Barkhane (2014–2022), at its peak deploying 5,500 French troops across five countries within the G5 Sahel framework, represented France's most ambitious military commitment on the continent. Its failures were multiple: it could not deliver political solutions, its counterterrorism targeting frequently produced civilian casualties that fuelled resentment, and it became culturally associated with neo-colonial continuity. The 2020 and 2021 coups were as much anti-French as anti-democratic. By 2022 the junta had expelled French forces; by 2023 the 15,000-strong MINUSMA UN mission had also departed at Bamako's request.

France has not been passive in the face of this expulsion. Paris sought to recalibrate its regional posture through the Coalition for the Sahel framework and bilateral security arrangements with coastal states — Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire, and Benin — repositioning its military footprint southward along the Gulf of Guinea. French diplomatic pressure on ECOWAS to maintain sanctions on the Malian junta reflected an attempt to exercise influence through institutional leverage in the absence of direct military presence. These efforts have enjoyed limited success: the AES bloc's cohesion, and the depth of anti-French sentiment across the Sahelian information environment, have significantly constrained Paris's room for manoeuvre. 

Russia moved into this space with characteristic opportunism. Africa Corps — the successor to the Wagner Group following the Tinzaouaten debacle — numbers between 1,000 and 2,500 personnel in Mali, compensated partly through access to gold concessions and mineral extraction rights. This constitutes a neo-mercantilist arrangement that aligns Moscow's commercial and strategic interests in ways that French partnerships, constrained by democratic oversight and international legal obligations, never were. It is worth noting, however, that Russia's vulnerabilities in Mali were structural from the outset. Moscow's commitments in Ukraine have consumed materiel, personnel, and political attention at precisely the moment its African deployments require sustained logistical support; the Africa Corps presence was always a relatively thin force whose effectiveness depended on junta goodwill and the absence of a sophisticated military challenge. The April offensive exposed both of these dependencies simultaneously.

Regional Contagion and Institutional Collapse

The geopolitical contagion effects of the Mali crisis are already visible across a six-country arc. Burkina Faso and Niger, both now under juntas affiliated with the Alliance of Sahel States (AES), conducted joint airstrikes in Mali following 25 April — a demonstration of bloc solidarity, but also a signal of how thoroughly the regional security architecture has been redrawn. The AES, formed in September 2023 by the three junta states after their withdrawal from ECOWAS, represents a fundamental reorganisation of Sahelian geopolitics: three states that share a jihadist insurgency, a Russian security partnership, and hostility to French influence, but whose institutional capacity for genuine regional cooperation remains extremely limited. Burkina Faso itself faces JNIM assaults on its military posts in the Sahel and Est regions; Niger faces IS-SP pressure in Tillaberi and Diffa. Both countries cancelled May Day celebrations citing security concerns — a small but telling symbol of how thoroughly jihadist insurgency has normalised as a permanent feature of political life.

ECOWAS, the West African regional bloc from which Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger dramatically withdrew in 2023, issued a condemnation of the attacks and called for regional unity — but its institutional leverage is at a nadir. A first formal AES-ECOWAS interaction since May 2025 took place in Togo on 18 April 2026, suggesting tentative re-engagement, but this is far too fragile to constitute a coherent regional response.

Algeria occupies a structurally ambiguous position. Historically the primary mediator in Malian-Tuareg negotiations, Algeria shares a 1,376-kilometre border with Mali, has its own restive Tuareg and Amazigh minority questions, and has a long-standing interest in preventing both a jihadist state in northern Mali and an independent Tuareg entity that might inspire its own communities. The collapse of the Algiers Agreement and Algeria"s exclusion from current mediation architecture leaves the region without its traditional conflict manager at precisely the moment when management is most needed.

Senegal’s President Bassirou Diomaye Faye called on 2 May for a coordinated African response, emphasising the strategic importance of the port of Dakar for Malian supply chains — a recognition that if JNIM"s blockade of Bamako"s western supply routes fully consolidates, Senegalese traders, logistics firms, and government revenues will all be directly affected. The humanitarian implications are severe: hundreds of thousands are newly displaced in northern Mali, supply chains are disrupted, food security is deteriorating, and international NGO access is constrained both by the security environment and by the junta"s hostility to Western-affiliated organisations.

Fanon's Warning and the Permanence of Colonial Space

In "The Pitfalls of National Consciousness," Frantz Fanon issued a diagnosis that continues to apply to post-colonial Mali. Writing in 1961, as the wave of African independence crested, Fanon did not celebrate decolonisation — he anatomised its probable failure. The national bourgeoisie of the newly independent states, he argued, would not transform the colonial order but inherit it intact. Concentrated in the capital, its innermost vocation was that of the intermediary: not "the captain of industry" but "the businessman," whose "historic mission" consisted "prosaically of being the transmission line between the nation and a capitalism, rampant though camouflaged, which today puts on the mask of neo-colonialism." 

The postcolonial state, in Fanon's diagnosis, would prove to be a colonial state with a personnel change — the same extraction, neglect of the interior, and violence against those who refused assimilation — and when that bourgeois phase finally exhausted itself through its own contradictions, "it will be seen that nothing new has happened since independence was proclaimed, and that everything must be started again from scratch." The changeover, Fanon insisted, "will not take place at the level of the structures set up by the bourgeoisie during its reign, since that caste has done nothing more than take over unchanged the legacy of the economy, the thought, and the institutions left by the colonialists."

What Fanon identified as the defining spatial logic of the colonial world — a world "divided into compartments," "cut in two". Bamako has remained, across six decades, what it was under French colonial administration: the administrative, commercial, and military centre of a notional state whose authority evaporated at the edge of the Sahara. Each successive government — democratic or military, Western-aligned or Russia-aligned — reproduced the same spatial hierarchy: investment and institutional presence concentrated in the south and west, security operations conducted against the north, and the Tuareg population oscillating between neglected subjects and designated enemies. The juntas of 2020 and 2021 replaced French force with Russian force, but they did not replace the logic of colonial space. In Fanon's terms, they exchanged one set of foreign advisors "whose army pins the people down, immobilising and terrorising them" for another.

Fanon's critique runs deeper than governance failure, and it is here that the Mali case demands the most sustained engagement with his thought. He understood that the colonial wound was epistemological as well as spatial: the colonised intellectual, having "based his consciousness upon foundations which are typically foreign," produces a postcolonial state structurally incapable of imagining the interior as a political community. The Malian state's relationship to Azawad has been precisely this failure of political imagination — not administrative incapacity alone, but a categorical one, an inability to conceive of the north as anything other than, in Fanon's words, "a problem to be managed, a territory to be secured, a resource to be extracted." The language of the accords — promising autonomy, development, integration — was the language of a postcolonial bourgeoisie performing sovereignty without possessing the political imagination required to enact it.

Fanon's analysis of the single party and the army is equally prescient when applied to Mali's junta period. He described with clinical accuracy how the national bourgeoisie, lacking the economic power of a genuine bourgeoisie, defaults to the coercive apparatus: "in these poor, underdeveloped countries, where the rule is that the greatest wealth is surrounded by the greatest poverty, the army and the police constitute the pillars of the regime — an army and a police force advised by foreign experts." The military expenditure data cited earlier in this essay — rising from 2.9% to 5.1% of GDP while per capita social service expenditure declined in real terms since the 2021 coup — is precisely the resource allocation Fanon described: a state that cannot govern through legitimacy governing instead through coercion, and doing so with the assistance of foreign advisors whose interests are extractive rather than developmental. Africa Corps's gold concessions are the neo-colonialist economic structure Fanon identified as the structural consequence of postcolonial bourgeois rule.

Mahmood Mamdani's framework, developed in Neither Settler nor Native, provides the conceptual complement to Fanon's historical diagnosis. Mamdani argues that the postcolonial state inherited the colonial distinction between the citizen, governed through rights, and the subject, governed through customary and coercive mechanisms that bypass rights entirely. In Mali, the Bambara-dominated political centre has functioned as the space of citizenship; the Tuareg north has functioned as the space of subject. JNIM's rise has replaced one coercive authority over subject populations with another — its shadow governance operates through taxation, sharia adjudication, and community protection rather than constitutional rights — while leaving the underlying distinction between governed citizens and administered subjects entirely intact. The form of power has changed; the structure of domination has not.

This is why the standard framework for analysing the Malian crisis — fragile state, terrorist threat, Russian interference, French miscalculation — is structurally insufficient. It describes symptoms without naming the condition. Fanon's own answer, in The Wretched of the Earth, was ultimately revolutionary: the peasantry of the interior was "the only spontaneously revolutionary force of the country," and only a politics genuinely rooted in their social world could produce a state that was not structurally a continuation of colonial rule. Fanon was unambiguous about why: "the fellah, the unemployed man, the starving native do not lay a claim to the truth; they do not say that they represent the truth, for they are the truth." The interior was not a security problem to be pacified but the political substance that any genuine decolonisation would have to begin from.

Whether JNIM's shadow governance represents any kind of fulfilment of that aspiration is a question that should deeply unsettle anyone tempted to read the jihadist advance as a form of popular justice. JNIM does not offer a politics of the peasantry in Fanon's sense — it offers an alternative hierarchy of authority, one that extracts tribute, enforces doctrinal conformity, and governs through coercion as readily as through consent. What it does offer, and what explains its organic expansion across the Malian interior, is legibility: rules, adjudication, protection, and a predictable structure of obligation that the Malian state never provided. 

The fact that communities across central and northern Mali find this preferable to Bamako's intermittent, punitive, and ethnically partial presence is not an endorsement of jihadist governance — it is, as Fanon would have recognised immediately, the verdict of populations for whom the postcolonial state never ceased to be a foreign imposition. The Sahel demands this quality of analytical attention precisely because it forces a confrontation with the structural logic of a colonial spatial order that independence never dismantled, and whose consequences — sixty-five years later — are still being written in displacement, famine, and the wreckage of states that were never, in Fanon's deepest sense, states at all. 

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