Counter-insurgency governance in the Sahel

Abstract Since 2013, the multiplication of regional and international strategies and actions directed at stabilizing Mali and the Sahel, and at countering and preventing violent extremism, has not improved the situation there and, arguably, some of it has made it worse. This article analyses the type of political order and regional governance that has been and is being built after almost a decade of international interventions in the West African Sahel. It is an effort at theorizing and making sense of what is considered here to be a permanent state of intervention in the Sahel that has evolved into a form of counterinsurgency governance—a concept being proposed to point to the influence and the infusion of counterinsurgency principles into philosophies of governance. This article argues that counterinsurgency governance insists on a set of power relations and configurations that seeks to impose limits, parameters and boundaries to the purpose of and the form that Sahelian states, governments and governance ought to take. As such, counterinsurgency governance is simultaneously a mode of governance and a web of political practices and contestation whose mechanisms have failed at fully implementing its principles in the Sahel. Its fallback is the emergence of a regional strategy to manage and establish limits to Sahelian political possibilities.