Over the past decade, #Sahel has gone from being a non-place – Donald Duck always travelled to Timbuktu in the Malian part of Sahel when he made a mistake in Andeby – to becoming a place that every government must have an opinion about. After #Norway bombed #Libya in 2011 and Norwegian Statoil employees were killed in Amenas in Algeria in 2013, the Norwegian government has also begun to take an interest in the countries on the southern border of the Sahara.
In 2016, Norway decided to open an embassy in Bamako, #Mali. In February of the following year, Norway hosted a major international donor conference that raised funds for peace and development in the Sahel. When the embassy opened in January 2018, it was the first Norwegian embassy in the Sahel ever. In September of the same year, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs launched its own strategy for the Sahel, and shortly thereafter, the department received a dedicated position focused on the region.
Norway is also increasing its military and civilian assistance to the Sahel countries: #Mauritania, Mali, #Burkina Faso#, #Niger, and #Chad. There are about 60 Norwegian soldiers in the #UN mission MINUSMA, which aims to maintain peace in Mali. Norway contributes NOK 500 million annually to G5 Sahel, a military counter-terrorism initiative driven by the region’s five countries.
But the Norwegian pot is also increasing on the long-term civilian level: Norway’s aid to Mali has increased every year from NOK 74 million in 2011 to NOK 250 million in 2018. In Niger, Norwegian funding increased from NOK 10 million to NOK 700 million during the same period.
Sahel has become important not only for Norway but also for the #EU and the #US. The US military command unit #AFRICOM carries out intelligence and trains the military units of Sahel countries. The EU is the main sponsor of the UN mission #MINUSMA. France is often the driving force behind the EU’s increase in both military presence and civilian assistance to the Sahel – all Sahel countries were previously French colonies.
Knowledge-intensive and liberating
Many consultants and commissioned researchers have done well on the crises in the Sahel. Apart from France, there is little knowledge about the Sahel in Europe, including Norway. Brussels-based International Crisis Group and Geneva-based Small Arms Survey, along with the Washington-based Africa Center for Strategic Studies and researchers associated with the OECD in Paris, have made recommendation after recommendation to bureaucrats and politicians about what they should do to achieve peace and development in the Sahel. Without necessarily having much knowledge of the situation themselves, they simply know more than politicians.
In contrast, Identités sahéliennes en temps de crise is very knowledge-intensive and liberating, free from solutions to crises, completely without recommendations for what we in the West should do. Spread over just over 350 pages in 14 chapters written by 18 academics, many of them young and most born in the Sahel, they present nuanced images.
Including the word «crisis» in the book title is probably just something the German publisher of this book, which is written in French (10 chapters) and English (4 chapters), wanted for commercial reasons. Many of the authors say that “crisis” is normal in the Sahel, and thus the term is used incorrectly. Here we get a range of analyses of the backgrounds of what we call the «crisis in the Sahel», analyses that do not limit themselves to the number of weapons in circulation, conflicts between nomadic herders and farmers, criminal smuggling networks for people and #drugs, Islamist movements supported by the #Middle East#, etc. In this book, the different chapters provide knowledge to understand how all of this could have arisen. For example, As Lecocq and Niang point out, it is interesting that the «status quo» or stronger state institutions, which is often an expressed political goal when the West talks about the Sahel, is not a goal for most people in this area.
Mobile
In the Sahel, everything is mobile: people, animals, borders, ethnic identity, and political alliances. Mobility is something that the central government, from colonial times to the present, has tried to punish (higher taxes for nomads) and reduce (requirements for permanent residency), without success. People, both rich and poor, use mobility for its value. They adapt and exploit the opportunities that arise at any given time. In cooperation with the state, many new opportunities arise. The weaker the state institutions are, the less control the state has over its citizens, and the more opportunities there are to gain some advantage.
My only objection to the book is that it could have included chapters on Chad, Mauritania, and Burkina Faso as well. The Sahel is reduced to #Senegal, Mali, and Niger. However, we get value for our effort by reading long, informed, detailed chapters about these countries based on thorough, long-term fieldwork.
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