Transnational counterterrorism assemblages: the case of preventing and countering violent extremism in Mali

ABSTRACT

This article explores how the threat of terrorism has been addressed at the policy level by offering a fine-grained analysis of a specific preventing and countering violent extremism (P/CVE) project implemented in Mali between 2018 and 2021 by a composite mix of international and national practitioners. Despite the current and almost complete detachment from the international and European security community, Mali has been, for a long time, a critical actor in the construction of what we identify as a transnational counterterrorism assemblage. This paper specifically focuses on three parts of the process leading to the assemblage: (1) the context and the political opportunities behind its creation, (2) how a specific north/south epistemic community of experts and practitioners has emerged in Mali and shaped the cognitive, normative and practical dimensions of the policy field and finally (3) the mechanisms at work in the practice of counterterrorism, from design to implementation on the ground. In doing so, the article contributes to the existing academic debate by problematising received interpretations of P/CVE as a north to south transfer of policy priorities and schemes of action. We show how current P/CVE activities are, rather, defining new social standards and practices of security elaborated at the intersection of the north/south divide. We finally offer some reflections on the unexpected consequences of such a construction in relation to the following national and international political crisis of the country.

KEYWORDS:

• assemblage
• counterterrorism
• Global North/Global South
• Mali
• P/CVE
• security expertise

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors wish to thank the United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute (UNICRI) and the International Center for Counter-Terrorism (ICCT) for the collaboration offered for this research.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 One of the authors of this article participated in the project as an external evaluator of MERIT. For further considerations about the positionality of the authors and its implications in terms of access and potential biases, see the methodological note.

2 A linguistic and conceptual clarification is needed here: in this article, unless indicated otherwise, by “regional” we mean “macro-regional” organisations and spaces (such as the Sahel), whereas by “local” we mean “national/domestic”. This choice is in line with how international relations literature – unlike geography – usually employs and conceptualises these terms (Fawn, 2009). It also reproduces the use of these terms made by the transnational network of experts/practitioners under scrutiny here.

3 Following the military coup d’état of May 2021, the new Malian government has decided to terminate most of the security and counterterrorism agreements signed with its international partners, a decision which is bringing into question the security architecture deployed in the country throughout the last decade.

4 Even after decades of decentralisation reforms implemented in Mali, security, counterterrorism and most of the associated policies and activities have remained strongly centralised sectors that are essentially planned, defined and implemented in Bamako. This lack of delegation and decentralisation of power explains the absence of subnational institutions involved in the MERIT project.

5 ‘Theory of Change’ is a widely diffused expression in policy and academic circles alike, usually employed to describe the methodology followed for planning, managing and evaluating a specific project or policy initiativeand for clarifying the kind of consequences that the action is expected to generate (Connell & Kubisch, 1998). We opted here to maintain this wording, as this was the expression employed by most of the interviewees when asked to explain their approach vis-à-vis MERIT.

6 We can remark here that these personal connections had been built at least in part during the implementation of the previous P/CVE project, which had been funded by USAID.

7 Interview carried out with the former local focal point of the donor Embassy in March 2021, as part of the evaluation process.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Fonds De La Recherche Scientifique - FNRS: [Grant Number Program ‘Postdoctoral Researcher’ n. 40000345]; Gerda Henkel Foundation: [Grant Number Special Programme ‘Security, Society and the State’].