Jihadist Insurgencies in the Sahel

Abstract

Over the last decade, jihadist violence has expanded and intensified throughout the Sahel region. Jihadi groups, including Boko Haram, Islamic State West Africa Province, Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM), Katiba Macina, and al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), have established strongholds in many places in the central Sahel, as well as in and around the Lake Chad Basin. As they strengthen their presence, Sahelian jihadists have introduced new changes in local social relations and practices, experimented with new forms of governance, and attempted to insert themselves into the local political economy. Yet, as they gain ground and conquer new spaces, their governance model has also shown its limits: their presence has increasingly fueled deadly communal violence, and infighting among jihadi groups has become recurrent and deadly. This chapter analyses the factors and dynamics behind this surge of jihadi violence in the Sahel. It attempts to situate the global jihadi discourse within the spectrum of Islamic ideologies and discourses and elaborates on the dynamics, both at the state and local levels, that have favored the emergence of jihadi groups.