The Construction of Terrorist Threat in Mali: Agency and Narratives of Intervention

Abstract

s Through a close textual analysis of US diplomatic cables and other relevant documents, this article provides new empirical data to trace the mutual construction of Mali as a site of terrorist threat. It argues that this mutual construction paradoxically enhanced the agency of Malian foreign policy elites in negotiations with their US interlocutors and highlights the effectiveness of Malian deployment of this discourse to shape the terms upon which intervention took place in the 2002–2012 period. It shifts the focus of the analysis of intervention in Mali both in space and in time through centering the US–Mali relationship pre-2012, displacing the dominant post-2013 France–Mali frame. This opens up a new dialectical and interimperial perspective on the agency of the Malian foreign policy elite in shaping the terms upon which intervention took place. This demonstrates the need for both a wider lens and a longer historical scope on investigations of intervention, particularly relevant as this discourse of terrorist threat has since 2013 spread beyond Mali to the wider Sahel region.