From Tuareg nationalism to Jihad: changing patterns of militancy in Mali

• Yvan Guichaoua (East Anglia)
• Danford Room, Arts Building
• Part of the Africa Talks Spring 2014 seminar series

Abstract

The talk will try to explain the transformations of logics of irregular militancy in northern Mali over the past ten years. Namely, it focuses on the partial (and possibly reversible) eviction of Tuareg nationalist militancy by religious militancy advocating the local enforcement of the Sharia Law, as well as the Jihad. The shift from one sort of militancy to another results from individual trajectories of conversion among leaders and followers, from confrontations between antagonistic tribal factions, but also, crucially, from complex alliances between heterogenous domestic and international actors. I will trace the major historical steps that have produced these dramatic changes and insist on the exogenous processes catalyzing them, whether state-driven, economic or political.