“The adventure is not easy.” The Discretionary Politics of Social Suffering and Agency in Post-Deportation Narratives in Southern Mali

Drawing on eight months of ethnographic fieldwork in the West African state of Mali (2014–2016), this article delves into the local, national, and transnational effects of (externalized) European and North African deportation regimes and reactions to them by civil society actors and deportees themselves. This work aims to contribute to a better understanding of how geographical, physical, social, and psychological spaces are reshaped through interactions with bordering practices. Deportation generally takes the form of (il)legal, bureaucratic measures and violent interventions that are perceived as deeply unjust. They generate anger, alienation, and uncertainty among those deported and their families and associates. By seeking patterns in the accounts of social suffering in deportees’ narratives, the article seeks, empirically and analytically, to unravel multilevel bordering practices through examining localized, agentic forms of bordering power. The post-deportation context involves southern Mali, an area subject to dramatic desertification and loss of sustainable livelihoods.

U.S.–Nigerian Relations

The United States and Nigeria have a long history, stretching back to the transatlantic slave trade in the 18th century and continuing today through economic and security partnerships. While the relationship has evolved over time and both countries have helped to shape each other’s histories in important ways, there remains a tension between hope and reality in which both sides struggle to live up to the expectations set for themselves and for each other. The United States looks to Nigeria to be the model of progress and stability in Africa that the West African state wants to become; Nigeria looks to American support for its development and security needs despite the United States continuously coming up short. There have been many strains in the relationship, and the United States and Nigeria have continued to ebb and flow between cooperation and conflict. Whatever friction there might be, the relationship between the United States and Nigeria is important to analyze because it offers a window to understanding trends and broad currents in international history such as decolonization, humanitarianism, energy politics, and terrorism.

Security and Intelligence Challenges in Guinea-Bissau, Africa’s Narco-State and Issues Beyond Borders

This paper focuses on the international security concerns in relation to the disquiets in the tiny West African state, Guinea-Bissau since independence. The country famously known as “narco-state” faces formidable challenges with weak governance negatively impacting on intelligence services. Intelligence and security reform is a building block of democracy, but this has been habitually weakened in Guinea-Bissau during the last four decades. The state remains one of the most fragile nations in the world having had its security culture totally perturbed, occasioned by the military rule since independence from Portugal in 1974. With over nine coup d’états that have been staged with a number of state administrations toppled coupled with an avalanche of internal conflicts, and prevalence of transnational phenomena (cocaine trafficking), and other traditional state-based challenges, the African narco-state has been left with a very weak governance structure, security, and intelligence services. The study examines Guinea-Bissau’s intelligence culture drawing from secondary sources to understand how intelligence has been shaped and how intelligence has influenced the country in the context of poverty and authoritarianism. The study examines the various factors that have shaped the state’s intelligence, analyzing the transformation and reform in the state’s defense and security sector. It provides recommendations so the Bissau-Guinean intelligence community can be more effective. This study uses secondary sources and makes use of descriptive and content analyses techniques.

Part 2 The Post-Cold War Era (1990–2000), 43 The ECOWAS Intervention in Sierra Leone—1997–99

This chapter analyses the intervention by the Economic Community of West African state forces, known as ECOMOG, into Sierra Leone from 1997-1999. After a brief review of the very complex facts surrounding this intervention and the generally positive reaction from the international community, this chapter reviews the legal justifications for this intervention and tests them against the jus ad bellum existing at that time. Reasons given were the restoration of a democratically elected government, self-defence, humanitarian intervention, intervention by consent or invitation and retrospective authorisation by the Security Council to a regional peacekeeping operation. None of these are found to have met the tests for legality within jus ad bellum. A final justification argues that this case study is a precedent as an African exception to the prohibition on the use of force with delegation or assumption of powers by an African regional organisation. This would be a troubling challenge to the United Nations Charter regime but might well be part of a larger trend of African use of force initiatives.

Precolonial Legacies and Institutional Congruence in Public Goods Delivery

Scholars have long identified political bias in the way African politicians distribute state resources. Much of this literature focuses on the role of group identities, mainly ethnicity, and partisanship. This article shifts the focus to local governments, which have become increasingly important players in basic social service provision, and argues that public goods allocation under democratic decentralization is intimately shaped by historical identities. Specifically, the author highlights the role of identities rooted in the precolonial past. To explain this, she articulates a theory of institutional congruence, arguing that greater spatial overlap between formal institutional space and informal social identities improves the ability of elites to overcome local coordination problems. Looking to the West African state of Senegal, the author deploys a nested analysis, drawing on interviews with rural Senegalese elites to understand how the precolonial past shapes local politics today via the social identities it left behind. She also tests the argument with a unique, geocoded data set of village-level public goods investments in the 2000s, finding that areas that were once home to precolonial states distribute goods more broadly across space. These patterns cannot be explained by ethnic or electoral dynamics. Two brief examples from on-the-line cases illuminate how the presence of precolonial identities facilitates local cooperation. The article thus calls into question the tendency to treat identities as static over time, highlighting the interactive relationship between institutions and identities while drawing attention to emerging subnational variation in local government performance following decentralization reforms across the developing world.

Tokyo and Beijing to vie for influence in Africa

Subject China-Japan competition in Africa. Significance At the sixth Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD) in August, Japan pledged 30 billion dollars in public and private support for African development over the next three years. This forms part of a wider shift in Tokyo's foreign policy to rebrand itself as a partner for sub-Saharan Africa, leading to speculation about rising competition with China in the region. Impacts France gradually will lose its 'preferred bidder' status for many West African state contracts due to East Asian competition. Chinese training for political party officials may heighten authoritarian tendencies, particularly around information control. Japan's lack of an equivalent to China's Confucius Institutes will limit knowledge of Japanese language and culture in Africa. Tokyo's small peacekeeping force in South Sudan will increase its military presence on the continent, exacerbating Beijing's anxieties.

May God Repay You: The Tenet of Baraji in Southern Mali, West Africa

Muslims in the West African state of Mali usebaraji, which translates from Bambara as ‘divine reward’ or ‘recompense’, as a criterion for understanding proper religious practice. The concept also drives Muslims’ lifelong aim to acquire the unspecified amount of merit that God requires for a person to enter paradise. Drawing from life history and ethnographic research, this piece deepens understanding of West African Islam by exploring the Qur’anic basis ofbarajiand situates the concept as a form of value through which Muslims discern the complementary places of different ritual practices and daily choices in their lives. In order to understand the ways that Malian Muslims seek measurable units ofbarajito benefit both the living and the dead, this study also shows how kin earnbarajion one another’s behalf, especially through posthumous sacrifices. By doing so, the article highlights death as a process in which the acquisition ofbarajicontinues through kin and sacrifices, revealing West African Islam as embedded in daily social life and relations with one’s ancestors.

The End of a Hundred-Year-Old Archaeological Riddle: First Dating of the Columns Tomb of Kumbi Saleh (Mauritania)

One century after its discovery, the Columns Tomb of Kumbi Saleh (Mauritania) remains an archaeological riddle. Since 1914, six field programs have been successively carried out at the medieval urban site of Kumbi Saleh, which now is commonly identified as Ghana. The latter was the famous capital city of the medieval West African state, which controlled the gold mines of West Africa and was involved in the gold trade with North Africa and the Mediterranean Basin. However, interpretation of the tomb, the largest structure from the necropolis, is still an issue as its dating itself has never been firmly established. As a consequence, scholars have usually referred to an unsatisfactory timeframe spanning 1000 years. The study of this monument was recently resumed, motivated by the rediscovery of bones collected in the tomb in 1914 and stored at the Musée de 1'Homme (Paris, France). AMS radiocarbon dating of the bone and tooth apatite fraction of three skulls demonstrates that the three individuals occupying the main vault of the tomb died between the end of the 11th century and the 12th century, precisely at the time of expansion of the Muslim Almoravid movement south of Sahara.