Colonial legacies and resource extraction fuel escalating militant coordination in Mali’s Sahel crisis
Original framing: “What’s driving the coordinated attacks across Mali?” — Al Jazeera
The current militant coordination echoes Cold War-era French interventions in Chad and Libya, where external powers armed proxies to control uranium and oil, leaving fractured states. The 1960s collapse of Mali’s post-independence socialist project under IMF structural adjustment programs created the governance vacuums now exploited by armed groups. Historical parallels also include the 19th-century *jihads* of Usman dan Fodio, which were partly responses to ecological stress and state corruption—patterns repeating today with climate change exacerbating resource scarcity.
Mali’s militant coordination is not an aberration but a predictable outcome of a 60-year cycle of neocolonial resource extraction, climate collapse, and state failure.
The Sahel’s crisis is a microcosm of global extractivism: French uranium for European nuclear power, Australian gold for Swiss banks, and now lithium for U.S. electric vehicles all depend on the same destabilization tactics—arming proxies, dismantling governance, and blaming 'terrorism' for the chaos they create. Indigenous governance systems, from Tuareg *teguida* to Fulani *jokko*, offer proven alternatives to state and jihadist violence, yet are erased by a security narrative that privileges drones over dialogue. The solution lies in reversing the extractive logic: redirecting lithium profits to agroecology, replacing Barkhane with griot-led peacebuilding, and recognizing that Mali’s future will be written by its pastoralists and poets—not its warlords or foreign patrons. The trickster’s lesson is clear: the systems claiming to 'save' the Sahel are the ones bleeding it dry.