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ISIS and Al-Qaeda as Strategies and Political Imaginaries in Africa: A Comparison between Boko Haram and Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb
No full textBy analysing Boko Haram and Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, this article argues that ascriptions to international jihadist brands are linked to local movements’ political economy and geopolitical imaginaries, and, therefore, driven more by contingent strategic considerations rather than by ideological motives. Consequently, three sets of evidence are discussed, by drawing also on fieldwork conducted in Mali and Niger from 2013 to 2016: the discourses of these actors; their political economies; their use of political violence. In conclusion, we analyse the ‘territorialised-deterritorialised cleavage’ and argue that this has greater heuristic value to understand African ‘jihadisms’ than existing categorisations of political violence
Security and informality in Libya: militarisation without military?
No full textThe article interrogates the analytical purchase of the concept of militarism in the case of Libya, and its relationship to securitisation. While Libya is often associated with widely securitised threats to the international order, its military institutions have been viewed with suspicion and ambivalence across different phases of Libyan history, making of Libya an uneasy fit for standard categorisations of militarism. This prompts the question of whether and under what circumstances militarism can occur without and even against the military. Drawing on a historical-sociological analysis, the article shifts the focus to micropolitical dynamics and extra-institutional agency with a view to unpacking the complex entanglement of formal and informal armed actors in Libya’s hybrid security governance. The concepts of informalisation of militarism and militarisation of informality are used as analytical lenses to reconstruct the partial, failed, contested and hijacked attempts to build ‘modern’ military institutions in Libya. I suggest that the repertoire of militarism is not so much an end in itself, but a resource mobilised by local and international actors in a contentious field of state-building practices
Human smuggling across Niger: State-sponsored protection rackets and contradictory security imperatives
No full textIn recent years, Niger has gained prominence as a hub for the smuggling of migrants from West Africa to North Africa and Europe. Urged on by European concerns, Niamey has adopted repressive measures to contain such migrations in the region. These, however, have largely failed, and have yielded unintended and unexpected results, which challenge policy predictions. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, the article suggests that contradictory security imperatives have brought about the de facto regularisation of human smuggling. As a result, protection rackets sponsored by the state through patronage networks have severely limited the impact of externally sponsored measures to counteract irregular migration
Imagined Libya: geopolitics of the margins
Full text linkWhether referring to the artificiality of its (post-)colonial construction or to the fragmentation of its sovereignty since 2011, the weakness of Libya’s statehood is a recurrent theme in policy and scholarly discourses. Scholars of history and international politics have expanded the framework to apprehend the processes of state (de/)formation underpinning Libya’s fragilities beyond the problematic “failed state” paradigm to accommodate longue-durée and multi-scalar perspectives. Building on these advances, yet noting the need for a more consistent use of social constructivist lenses, the article adopts the perspective of critical geopolitics to explore the spatial discourses and imaginaries, both domestic and imported, that across history have shaped “Libya”, as well as its internal constituents and its external environment, through processes of identification, othering and belonging.
Given the diversity of uses – and abuses – connoting geopolitics and its critical variants, the first section of the article clarifies the meaning, relevance and methodology of the critical geopolitics approach herein employed. It is argued that Libya sits at the intersection of rival geopolitical imaginaries and competing spheres of influence that overlap and collide here. The subsequent sections analyze geopolitical discourses from different sources to offer a review of some important spatial imaginaries that have contributed to representing, constituting and apprehending Libya as a subject and an object of international politics: ancient geography’s environmentalism; Italy’s imperial colonialism; Gaddafi’s pan-Arabism and, later, pan-Africanism; and Turkey’s pan-Ottomanism.
Before modern colonisation, the imaginary of (today’s) Libyan territory was long apprehended through the dichotomy between urban (hadari) and rural (badawi) spaces, with the political and normative centre of gravitation oscillating from the former (during the Arab and later Ottoman hegemony) to the latter (during the rise of the Sanussi order). During the Italian colonisation, Libya was subsumed in Italy’s Mediterranean projections, whether as a necessary “fourth shore” to Italy’s expansion in its “own” Lebensraum, or as a bridge welding Europe and Africa within a unitary geopolitical entity called Eurafrica. Gaddafi’s pan-Arabism and pan-Africanism combined short-term political opportunism with a more ambitious attempt to challenge (neo-)colonial geopolitical imaginaries about the country’s identity and belonging, and its related security priorities. Yet they both contributed to the abusive manipulation of domestic ethnic cleavages, the weaponization of (the research into) the country’s history, and the progressive de-legitimation of the regime. Today, Libya has acquired a prominent role in Turkey’s geopolitical imaginary. After more than a century of substantial disregard, the rise of a pan-Ottoman geopolitical repertoire in Turkey and the nationalistic emphasis on the redeeming of the vatan (homeland) provide the key for interpreting Turkey’s resurrecting interest in Libya, and the justification of its military intervention vis-à-vis Ankara’s domestic audiences.
The exploration of these prominent geopolitical imaginaries on, by and about Libya highlights the tensions, intersections, and divergences underpinning different interpretations of the same territory. The enduring legacy of competing geopolitical imaginaries points to a plausible constitutive factor laying at the root of the polarisations and conflict dynamics that endanger the stability and survival of the Libyan state. Unearthing the competing geopolitical imaginaries on Libya can thus help illuminate the divergent approaches of the international actors intervening in the country, and those of their Libyan proxies struggling for recognition, be they Turkey’s allies, or Libya’s armed actors posturing as Europe’s gatekeepers in the contemporary iterations of the ambivalent geopolitical imaginary of Eurafrica. A critical geopolitics approach thus helps challenge the obsolete yet widespread view of Libya’s marginality in the international system, by unsettling reified spatial assumptions about the partition, position and constitution of Libya’s state. It is precisely Libya’s position at the periphery of rival geopolitical imaginaries and asserted spheres of influence that makes of it a crossroad of strategic vectors, a hotspot of collisions, and therefore a centre of concern
Fulfilling implausible expectations : reducing migratory flows from Libya amidst porous borders
Full text linkThis policy brief discusses the hypothesis that EU-sponsored border management policies explain the dramatic reduction in migratory flows from Libya to Italy over the past months. It argues that the data available dismiss the significance of the Libyan Coast Guard’s contribution to this end, and are insufficiently reliable to demonstrate the strengthening of Libya’s southern borders. These observations invite the conclusion that events taking place at Libya’s external borders provide a less convincing explanation for Europe-bound migratory flows than what occurs within Libya, thereby questioning the assumptions surrounding EU migration management and crisis response policies
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