For example, Baldaro (2020) explores security region-building in the Sahel from three different local perspectives – armed Islamist groups, political elites, and local populations – showing that the first views the West as the security threat, the second uses security-focused regional organization-building (G5 Sahel) to ensure regime security through extracting rents from international aid, while, for the third, regional circulation and mobility are crucial for securing livelihoods. Some of these agendas are aligned, while others conflict with Western interventions, and studies have shown that if Western interven- ers are not mindful of local contexts, ‘hybrid security governance’ and patronage politics may become entrenched, rather than ‘democratized’, through Western security assistance (Raineri and Strazzari, 2019).
Such in-depth and ethnographic studies are crucial for understanding various contexts, as well as for concept-building ‘from the periphery’ (Hönke and Müller, 2012). However, we also argue that this is not sufficient, as the local perspective gives too little attention to transnational entanglements other than with the West – and therefore misses crucial aspects of the making of (in)security in the Sahel. We therefore turn our attention to other actors than the usual Western suspects or their local beneficiaries. (my bold)
[By way of example,] scholars have focused mostly either on Western interveners of different kinds (e.g. the French military operations, security professionals from UN and EU missions, NGOs, development actors, researchers) or on a variety of local actors (e.g. state actors, security professionals, smugglers, armed groups, migrants) or security objects (mostly European border security technologies, boats, police vehicles, and so on). However, these are not the only actors or objects that are part of Sahelian (in)security assemblages: indeed, a range of transnational entanglements – which bring with them other actors, objects, practices, ideas, and rationalities from other parts of the world than Europe and Africa – are missing from this analysis.
[In particular], quotidian material infrastructures have crucial importance for the constitution of global politics, and the focus is then on the artifacts by which these actors become entangled (Salter, 2015, 2016). In our research, we focus on the materiality of transport infrastructures and logistics as sites where entanglements between geographically dispersed actors emerged. As our analysis will show, infrastructure serves multiple purposes that blur the distinction between trade, humanitarianism, and security – thereby nuancing the concept of security (Ziadah, 2019a).
[Again by way of example,] Turkish interviewees emphasize that Turkey is not engaging in the Sahel to counter France or the UAE, as is often purported in the press, but rather owing to its own interests (Libya, the Eastern Mediterranean) and the security interests of Sahelian countries (Interviews 5, 6 and 7). Turkish military relations with Sahelian countries are mainly bilateral, and Turkey has concluded military and security cooperation agree- ments with Niger (2020, 2013), Chad (2019), Burkina Faso (2019), Senegal (2022), and the other West African countries Togo (2021) and Nigeria (2021) (Biedermann, 2019; Gbadamosi, 2022; Özkan and Kanté, 2022). In the case of Niger, the security agreement from 2020 stipulates military training such as education and courses at military schools and centers; on-the-job training; mutual personnel exchange, including that of advisers and units; joint exercises as observer; operations other than war (i.e. peacekeeping and humanitarian aid operations); language courses; military history archives, publication, and museology; cooperation and training in logistical matters; and training/exchange in military intelligence, communications, electronics systems and warfare, cyber-defense matters, and defense against mines and explosives. According to several Turkish interviewees, this security agreement suggests that Turkey wishes to replicate its East Africa policy in the Sahel, which has included the training of Somalian security forces and police, and that it is also looking for the possibility of opening a military base in Niger in addition to the ones in Qatar, Libya, and Somalia (Interviews 5, 6 and 7).
SO WHAT?
[These developments] introduce new material artifacts, rationalities, resources, and connections independently of Western agendas. Taken together, these transnational entanglements that we have documented complement rather than radically challenge existing accounts of the production of (in)security in the Sahel: they point to the persistent need to embed analyses of Western interventions and their various local responses in larger, transnational frames that also account for South–South linkages and circulations in the making of contemporary (in)securities. (my bold)
That is, can we rethink pastoralist migrations across Sahelian borders as South-South linkages in just such ways?
Source.
E.M. Stambøl and T. Berger (2923). “Transnationally entangled (in)securities: The UAE, Turkey, and the Saharan political economy of danger.” Security Dialogue 54(5): 493–514 (accessed online at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/09670106231186942)
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 