Political Orders in the Making: Emerging Forms of Political Organization from Libya to Northern Mali

Abstract

The current political developments in Libya and northern Mali represent nothing less than the renegotiation of the postcolonial political order. The toppling of Libya’s authoritarian regime and the country’s subsequent disintegration into post-revolutionary camps, plus the continuing Tuareg rebellion in northern Mali accompanied by the rise of transnational jihadist forces, have fostered the fragmentation of state structures, greater heterogeneity in politics, and gains by nonstate power groups on the complex political stage. To assess these processes the article proposes three theoretical concepts and fields of research: heterarchy (historical and present), connectivities in northwest Africa, and the importance of local actors/locality.