Informality and insecurity in the Sahel: unravelling the hybrid political orders of Northern Mali and Northern Niger

Abstract

Since the Sahelian crisis broke out in 2012, Northern Mali and Northern Niger have been identified as the two potential epicentres of violence in the region. Nevertheless, while sharing very similar structural conditions and constraints, during the last decade these two subregions have scored very differently in terms of stability and armed conflict along the centre-periphery divide. Aiming to understand the divergent security patterns in Northern Mali and Northern Niger, this work highlights the importance of informal institutions as politically–and spatially contingent networks whose mechanisms for regulating authority and power are key for the appreciation of state capacity and political ordering, and essential for understanding statehood in the Sahel. We stress the importance of hybrid political orders and informality for the definition of political settlements which result in (a) the cooptation of political/economic competitors and the stabilisation of viable governance arrangements; or (b) an open contestation of authority and value-extraction that paves the way for destabilising dynamics. The diverging pattern exhibited by the two cases demonstrates that hybrid networks that straddle political and informal institutions are crucial in determining either the stabilisation or destabilisation of political settlements.