Rifle, Pen, and Prayer Beads: Constructing Political Legitimacy in Mali

Abstract

Rifle, Pen, and Prayer Beads:Constructing Political Legitimacy in Mali Dorothea E. Schulz (bio) Introduction On August 18, 2020, after months of popular unrest targeting the increasingly unpopular presidency of Ibrahim Boubacar Keita and rallies coordinated by Imam Mahmoud Dicko, a leading figure of Muslim opposition, a group of colonels from the Kati military base seized power and forced President Keita's resignation. Ignoring international calls for an immediate return to civilian rule, the leaders of the coup d'état underlined their determination to "put state politics on new foundations" before the next elections so as to reestablish law and order and put a stop to a general economic malaise brought about, in their account, by an increasingly corrupt civilian political elite under the previous presidencies of Alpha Oumar Konaré, Amadou Toumani Touré, and Ibrahim Boubacar Keita. Only nine months later, in May 2021, a transitional government put into place by the military leaders to signal their intention to return to civilian rule was terminated by another coup (the third one within a decade), when Colonel Assimi Goita, then vice president and leader of the 2020 military coup, arrested President Bah N'Daw and Moctar Ouane, the prime minister of the transitional government, and had himself installed as the head of state. The military leaders then retracted their promise to ensure a transition to civilian rule within the next eighteen months and hold presidential elections in February 2022—a move to which the country's long-standing allies in the Euro-American West responded by rallying other members of the West African bloc ECOWAS1 to impose economic and financial sanctions on Mali in January 2022. This special issue brings together studies that aim at historically grounded empirical investigations of political legitimacy in Mali.2 Many scholarly accounts and reports by foreign donor agencies have depicted the rising level of insecurity and political instability in Mali's different regions since the 2012 coup d'état as a sudden and somewhat surprising disruption of the country's role as a beacon of democratization in Africa (Bergamaschi 2007, 2014; Gavelle, Siméant, and Traoré 2013; Wing 2008, 2013). This special issue seeks to add analytical and empirical nuance to this view by [End Page 1] proposing a three-pronged intervention. First, we read the precarity and instability of present-day political institutions and procedural legitimacy as mirroring long-standing trends of asserting and contesting public authority. We thus seek to understand the instability that has shaped Malian politics since the toppling of President Touré in 2012 in light of the precarious legitimacy of political institutions and actors that has shaped political dynamics throughout Sahelian West Africa for decades. Second, in contrast to studies of the "Malian crisis" that center on either "the north," the "central region," or "the south" and Bamako, its political epicenter, the contributions by Souleymane Diallo and Dorothea Schulz and Andrew Hernández trace distinct regional trajectories of (de)constructions of public authority and legitimacy in contemporary Mali while keeping in mind the broader West African Sahelian setting of changing transborder regimes of (in)securitization (Bencherif and Campana 2017; Lacher 2008; Scheele 2012) and the extent to which Western donors' shifting agendas have changed the conditions for political praxis at the national and regional levels (Bergamaschi 2007; Mann 2006, 2015). Third, rather than view official legitimacy constructions as emanating from a coherent elite politics that may be contrasted to a "politics from below" (Bayart, Membe, and Comi 1992), the articles probe the role of different segments of the political elite in these processes, distinguishing three types of actors according to the symbolic register on which they draw to claim political legitimacy: first, politicians, who, as Western-school educated intellectuals (symbolized by "the pen"), owe their office to constitutionalism and democratic procedure; second, military leaders, whose power builds on their ability and willingness to impose order by force ("the rifle"); and third and finally, politically influential figures who claim authority by reference to Islamic prescripts as the ultimate foundation of public order ("prayer beads"). By examining the shifting relations among different segments of the political elite, we follow in the footsteps of historical and sociological studies on Sahelian West Africa...