Much of West Africa (and particularly the Sahel) may be once falling again under military government. This essay asks what, if anything, historians of Africa can contribute to an understanding of this phenomenon. I argue that writing the history and understanding the memory of military government will entail a renewed approach to political history and social theory. It will also entail confronting — just as so many citizens are currently doing — the peculiar failures of democracy in Africa's neoliberal era.

Jihadist groups have found a ‘safe haven’ in northern Mali. They have managed this by operating strategically to establish themselves and to develop relationships with local communities, but characteristics of the environment have also facilitated their development and survival. In northern Mali, the political landscape is fragmented, and replete with competition between the central authority and various groups of local elites, who are themselves divided. I conceptualise this fluid environment as a context that incentivises ‘political nomadism’. Using the Tuareg communities as an entry point, I explore the complex dynamics between local and national political actors and jihadist groups in northern Mali. I argue that the jihadist ‘safe haven’ in northern Mali is highly relational and has been facilitated by the form of political nomadism practiced in the region since the 1990s. The article is based on eight months of fieldwork conducted between 2016 and 2017 in Mali and Niger.

Although considerable global initiatives have been undertaken to tackle anaemia, its prevalence continues to be high in sub-Saharan African nations. In Mali specifically, anaemia represents a significant and pressing public health issue. The purpose of the present study was to examine the key risk factors related to anaemia among children aged 6–24 months (younger age group) and 25–59 months (older age group). We used the Mali 2018 Demographic and Health Survey data, collected from 8861 mothers with children under five. Logistic regression was used to assess the risk factors for childhood anaemia. The results suggest that the prevalence of anaemia was 88 % in the younger and 76 % in the older age groups. The risk factors unique to the younger age group were malaria (OR 4⋅05; CI 0⋅95, 11⋅3) and place of residence (OR 0⋅55; CI 0⋅32, 0⋅94), while for the older age group, they were morbidity (OR 1⋅91; CI 1⋅12, 3⋅24), drinking from a bottle (OR 1⋅52; CI 1⋅04, 2⋅22), and micronutrient intake (OR 0⋅61; CI 0⋅40, 0⋅91). Risk factors that significantly contributed to both age groups include breastfeeding, deworming, maternal anaemia, maternal education, and wealth index. Anaemia also varied by region. The widespread prevalence of anaemia can be attributed to a multitude of factors. In addressing this issue, it is imperative to acknowledge the unique characteristics of specific regions and rural areas, where the incidence of anaemia surpasses the national average. Therefore, any intervention efforts should be tailored to the specific needs and challenges of these areas.

Bamako, March 1991. 100,000 protesters took to the street challenging Mali's military regime. Both men and women participated in six months of protests, their actions shaped by class, gender, and generation. The press, in its reporting, produced a specific, gendered, image of protest, involving young men protesters and their exceptional mères indociles (rebellious mothers) motivated to protest by the risk of bodily harm to their children.1

Available historical sources for West Africa's Middle Niger c. 1450–1650 reveal that the ‘indigenous’ (non-Arab) Islamic scholarly class was already a self-conscious, independent social entity long before the clerical revolutions of later centuries. The influence of Muslim scholars was not limited to urban environments like Timbuktu, and clerical elites claimed a number of mostly independent communities throughout West Africa by the end of the sixteenth century. Mostly based on a reading of Arabic texts such as Muḥammad al-Kābarī's Bustān al-fawāʾid (‘Garden of Beneficial Prayers’) in dialogue with the Tārīkh Ibn al-Mukhtār and Tārīkh al-Sūdān (‘Timbuktu Chronicles’), this article argues that Muslim scholars were engaged in a spiritual war for independence clearly on display since the beginning of the Songhay empire. Scholarly texts display deep concern for tempering unjust political power and the protection and attraction of women, discourses that reveal a perilous clerical struggle to assert community independence. Later armed jihads were thus not so much a break from earlier traditions of clerical pacificism, they were the natural evolution from this earlier spiritual jihad.

While studies on the role of knowledge and expertise have seen a resurgence of interest in International Relations and in literature on peacebuilding and security governance, little is known how knowledge enters the governance routines after the initial establishment of peacebuilding operations. Taking the mandate decision-making process of MINUSMA and EUTM operations in Mali in the German parliament as case for our explorative study, we ask how knowledge has entered the parliamentary process and how various epistemic practices and epistemic agency shape this peacebuilding governance since 2013. Informed by an object-centred knowledge framework, we argue that the practices and types of agency involved mostly ‘lock-in’ the governing of robust peacebuilding in Mali in much broader foreign- and security policies routines. Epistemic practices are not primarily concerned with new impulses or critical analysis, but with rendering Mali governable as interventionary object. The epistemic authority of the government is dominant and we do not find much evidence that hegemonic knowledge is challenged. Intervening agents do extract certain knowledge via transnational channels from Mali, however, broader knowledge debates or the involvement of Malian agents are missing.

Sorghum plays a crucial role in the rural economy and nutrition of rural households in Mali. Yet the productivity of this crop is constrained by limited adoption of agricultural intensification technologies, which could be partly because technology development does not properly consider farmers' preferences. This study with smallholder farmers in southern Mali aimed to assess farmers' preferences for different attributes of sorghum technologies through the lens of sustainable intensification. The study used a discrete choice experiment, a method which involves asking individuals to state their preference over hypothetical alternative scenarios, goods or services. We considered six attributes corresponding to different domains of sustainable intensification: grain yield, risk of yield loss, soil fertility, nutrition, labor requirement and fodder yield. We analyzed the data using the mixed logit model, while considering the multinomial logit model as a robustness check. The findings revealed that smallholder farmers are strongly interested in transitioning from their existing sorghum-based cropping systems to those that closely align with these domains of sustainable intensification. However, there were diverse preferences among all the smallholder farmers studied, and between distinct sub-groups of smallholder farmers characterized by their social networks and agroecological zones, which yield relevant policy implications. Overall, these results support the growing research and development prioritization and policy interests toward scaling sustainable intensification among farmers, with a particular focus on human nutrition.

This article scrutinizes recent histories of colonial and international law that use metropolitan reactions to the ‘scandals of empire’ to project a reform-oriented version of European colonialism. In French West Africa, most scandals never reached the level of metropolitan debate; they hit dead ends in colonial bureaucracies. Analyzing one dead-end scandal, the M'Pésoba Affair, this article argues that colonial justice on the ground often adhered to a politics of expediency, not a reformist rule of law. To maintain their precarious grip on power, colonial administrators had to simultaneously appease their superiors, economic interests, and powerful African actors. Resolving the M'Pésoba Affair, for one, entailed navigating the complex entanglements of cotton production, chiefly disputes, Islamic policy, and interracial sexual relationships in a backwater of empire marked by anticolonial revolt and world war. Especially in moments of crisis, political constraints shaped the application of justice.

This paper combines population and climate data to estimate the volume of migration induced by the drought events that have hit Mali since the late 1980s. The results show that droughts have had the effect of decreasing net migration rates in the affected localities. This is true for both men and women, regardless of their age. The effect of drought episodes, however, is found to differ according to localities and households’ capacity to adapt to climatic constraints: it fades in localities characterized by more diversified crops and in areas that receive more rainfall on average. Climate shocks also had an impact on international mobility: over the 2004–2009 period, around 2300 additional departures per year can be attributed to the droughts that hit Mali during the 2000s. We forecast that, under different climate scenarios and population growth projections, mobility induced by drought events will substantially grow in the next decades.

Single-cross pearl millet hybrids are widely grown in India, but this cultivar type has not been adopted in Africa. Hybrids from India have proven to be highly susceptible to downy mildew disease in Africa, the continent where the disease originated. We investigated an alternative strategy of growing topcross hybrids where both the parents are of African origin and both are only partially inbred. We investigated root characteristics – length, diameter, area, volume and dry weight – under drought stress and well-watered controlled conditions in genotypes that included potential parents of topcross hybrids. Several, including population Civarex 06_05, had better developed roots under drought while also having good roots under more favourable conditions. Some of these genotypes were backrossed to a male-sterile line based on the A4 cytoplasm to produce male-sterile populations with stable male sterility. Civarex 06_05 had good combining ability when used as a female parent and produced high-yielding topcross hybrids. Two of the topcross hybrids were on restorer populations Toroniou, originating from Mali, and Maiwa from Nigeria. On the experimental station and in farmers’ fields, one was much superior in yield to the best local alternatives and both had superior downy mildew resistance. Current efforts on the seed production of these topcross hybrids are described, and the constraints to the commercialisation in Mali of promising topcross hybrids are discussed.

In the Sahel, host communities are among those most affected by recurrent internal displacement, but they are often ignored in responses to displacement. Furthermore, their situation has attracted little attention from researchers or other observers. The present article will argue that it is essential to provide these communities with adequate protection, especially as they play a leading role in providing humanitarian protection and assistance to internally displaced persons (IDPs). The article begins by examining the legal instruments that protect populations affected by forced displacement, in order to identify and present the legal protection they offer to IDP host communities. The article will then analyze and highlight the advantages of fully applying this protection. It will show that the recurrent violence and breaches of the law that these communities suffer are impeding the full realization of those advantages. Finally, the article shall propose solutions that would overcome the deficiencies noted and hence ensure enhanced protection for IDP host communities in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger.

More than 20 years after the adoption of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security, the international community is concerned with taking stock of its implementation in countries undergoing transitions from war to peace. This article contributes to a better understanding of the dynamics involved in implementing the Women, Peace and Security agenda through a focus on the frictional interactions that take place between different actors promoting women's participation in the peace process in Mali. Based on extensive fieldwork in Bamako between 2017 and 2019, it analyses interactions between different international and local actors in the Malian peace process through a discussion of vertical (between international and local actors) and horizontal (between local actors) friction. It finds that the way different actors respond to friction shapes relationships and impacts norm trajectories by triggering feedback loops, which in turn trigger new responses and outcomes.

In 1862, al-Ḥājj ʿUmar Fūtī Tall (d. 1864) conquered a prominent Muslim polity of the Middle Niger valley, the Caliphate of Ḥamdallāhi. Several months earlier, he had penned a long polemical work, Bayān mā waqaʿa, where he outlined his conflict with Ḥamdallāhi's ruler, Aḥmad III (d. 1862), and presented a legal justification for his eventual conquest. Al-Ḥājj ʿUmar was one of several West African Muslim intellectuals who articulated a new vision of power in the region. These intellectuals linked legitimate political rule with mastery over Islamic knowledge that they claimed only they had. Yet these linkages between religious authority and political power remain understudied. Al-Ḥājj ʿUmar's Bayān offers one example of political theology in nineteenth-century West Africa. In this article, I trace his arguments and explain how he constructs his authority and claims to sovereignty in this work. In the process, I conceptualize two theoretical frameworks — the ‘political geography of belief’ and the ‘political theology of knowledge’ — to demonstrate how a careful engagement with Arabic sources can help develop new approaches to the study of Muslim communities in African history and beyond.

This essay argues that the Independence Day's military parade in Mali has become a strategic site to negotiate fragile military and civil relations, and a repository to promote social change through the military experience. Drawing on field observations of the parade of the 50th anniversary of Independence in Bamako and the literature on political transitions, this essay demonstrates that military parades constitute meaningful sites for alternative engagements with democratic transitions. It examines the tactics and mechanisms deployed by the Malian national army to negotiate past human rights violations and authoritarian practices, as well as to seek the army's rehabilitation following the collapse of the military regime. By analysing military parades as a form and practice consolidating the ‘social contract’ between the army and the public after the political transition, this article contributes to the scholarship on transition and the study of military parades within the African continent.

This article introduces the concept of the dark side of cultural heritage protection. It points out how the many and mostly honorable efforts to protect cultural heritage against the harms of war and conflict sometimes contribute to make cultural heritage vulnerable or even to cause its destruction. The more we talk about cultural heritage and its value and the importance of protecting it, the more interesting it becomes for some groups to target it. This article argues that states, international organizations, and the heritage community need to recognize these negative side effects and make sure to consider them in future action.