Jihadist Insurgent Governance in the Sahel

I løpet av rapporteringsperioden 2023-2024 har det vært mindre aktiviteter fordi prosjektet nærmer seg slutten og aktivitetene har i hovedsak omhandlet å skrive på leveranser, å forsøke å lande en avtale med forlag om Special Issue, skriving av bok, samt ferdigstillelse av doktorgrad. - Doktorgradskandidat Natasja Rupesinghe har levert og fått godkjent doktorgraden sin ved University of Oxford i 2024. Tittelen på avhandlingen er: Community Responses to Jihadist Mobilisation in Central Mali. - Special Issue. International Affairs ga et ja med en rekke forbehold som vi vurderte som for krevende å takke ja til. Vi har derfor tatt kontakt med tidsskriftet Civil Wars, som vi avventer nærmere spesifiseringer i fht tidsfrist og krav. - Prosjektdeltakerne jobber med artikler. - Morten Bøås holder på å ferdigstille manus til boken Sahel. The Perfect Storm, C.Hurst Publishers. Kommer ut i 2025.

This project analyses jihadist insurgent governance in the Sahel in a comparative perspective. More specifically, we seek to answer the following research question: what explains variations in jihadist insurgent governance? JIGOV-Sahel will provide original data gathered through extensive fieldwork on jihadist insurgencies that have not been researched systematically or comparatively. This will be the first study to analyse variation of jihadist insurgent governance across and within cases including the Katiba Macina (Mali and Burkina Faso), Ansarul Islam (Burkina Faso), Islamic State in the Greater Sahara (Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso) and Boko Haram (Niger and Nigeria). The research project is motivated by two identified limitations in the study of rebel governance. First, jihadist insurgents are often analysed merely as ‘Islamic terrorists’ who rule through brutal violent force and sustain their operations through criminal activities. Scattered evidence in the Sahel suggests that this is not the case: jihadist insurgencies do govern, and even develop social contracts that are considered to be more relevant, and sometimes even more legitimate than that of the central state. Second, we argue that the institutionalist approach to rebel governance, which suggests that for rebels to govern they must control territory, develop institutions, and provide public services, is not sufficient to explain these Sahelian cases. We observe that these jihadist insurgencies govern instead by apply varying levels of coercion, provide some minimal services like courts, develop rudimentary Islamic institutions/practices, instrumentalise rights-based conflicts and development of social bonds with communities.