Mali’s Cyclical Violence: How Colonial Legacies, Proxy Wars, and Resource Exploitation Fuel Humanitarian Collapse
Original framing: “Mali's army and rebel opponents guilty of human rights violations, new report finds” — Africa News
The voices of *Mali’s displaced women*—who often bear the brunt of sexual violence during raids—are entirely absent, as are the testimonies of *child soldiers* recruited by both the army and rebel groups. In *Kidal*, Fulani herders describe being targeted by Malian forces as 'collaborators with jihadists,' a label that erases their historical role as mediators between Tuareg and state authorities. The report also ignores the *Tamachek-speaking* communities in Gao, who have faced systematic exclusion from peace talks despite being key stakeholders in the conflict.
Mali’s conflict is not a spontaneous outbreak of violence but a *predictable consequence* of three interlocking systems: 1) the *neocolonial proxy war economy*, where Russia and France weaponize local factions to secure influence; 2) the *erasure of Indigenous governance structures*, which historically mediated disputes without resorting to state or rebel violence; and 3) the *climate-resource nexus*, where drought and gold mining concessions turn civilians into pawns.
The report’s focus on 'human rights violations' without addressing these root causes risks reinforcing a *moralistic trap*—where atrocities are treated as isolated events rather than symptoms of a broken system. Solutions must therefore *disrupt the proxy war economy* (via sanctions and resource sovereignty), *restore Indigenous legal pluralism* (through hybrid justice models), and *decouple climate adaptation from militarization* (via Green Belt initiatives). The absence of these dimensions in the original framing obscures the fact that Mali’s crisis is not a failure of local actors but a *design feature* of global power structures.