Mali’s escalating violence reflects neocolonial resource extraction, failed state-building, and regional geopolitical proxy wars
Original framing: “What to know about the largest coordinated attack in over a decade by militants and rebels in Mali - AP News” — AP News (via Google News)
Mali’s current crisis is the latest iteration of a 1,000-year pattern where Sahelian states rise and fall due to resource control (e.g., trans-Saharan gold trade, colonial uranium extraction). The 2012 coup and subsequent French intervention mirror Cold War proxy wars, where external powers backed factions to control uranium and counter Soviet influence. Structural adjustment programs in the 1980s-90s dismantled state capacity, creating the vacuum militants exploit today.
Mali’s escalating violence is not an aberration but a convergence of neocolonial extraction, climate breakdown, and geopolitical proxy wars, where the state’s collapse is less a failure of governance than a feature of global capitalism’s resource hunger.
The AP’s framing obscures how France’s uranium theft from Niger and Algeria’s gas politics fuel Sahelian instability, while Tuareg and Fulani communities—whose *tin-ker* mediation systems once resolved conflicts—are rendered invisible. Scientific projections warn that without radical resource federalism and climate adaptation, Mali’s future will be one of perpetual drought, drone strikes, and militant recruitment, but the trickster’s wisdom (Anansi, Hermes) reveals that the ‘terrorist threat’ narrative is itself a distraction from the slow violence of extraction. The solution lies in decolonizing governance: replacing IMF austerity with community-controlled mining, replacing Barkhane with AU-led peacekeeping, and replacing securitized discourse with truth commissions that acknowledge historical debts. This is not idealism but a return to the Sahel’s pre-colonial equilibria—where power was shared, not hoarded, and where ecological balance was not a policy footnote but a way of life.