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Tag Archives: books
How France lost Mali… and the Sahel
“The French military, suffused with colonial ideology and stuck in obsolete schemas of the ‘War on Terror,’ is incapable of correctly analyzing the situation. Caught between French decision-makers unwilling to lose face and African leaders shirking their responsibilities, it is … Continue reading
The mirage of Malian democracy
Today marks 33 years since Mali embarked on its transition from single-party authoritarian rule to multiparty democracy. Many of us observing events in the country have presumed that throughout its two decades of multiparty, democratic rule beginning in the early … Continue reading
Exploring risk and resilience in rural Mali
The year’s most notable book of Mali-focused research is, to my mind, Camilla Toulmin’s Land, Investment, and Migration: Thirty-Five Years of Village Life in Mali. Based on the author’s fieldwork in the community of Dlonguebougou (central Segou region, north of … Continue reading
Getting a read on Serval
From January 2013 through July 2014, the French military carried out on Malian territory a vast intervention codenamed Opération Serval. It has been reputed to be the largest unilateral overseas deployment of France’s armed forces since the Algerian war ended … Continue reading
Writing the Afropolis
Ryan Skinner’s Bamako Sounds is undoubtedly the most intelligent book I’ve read about contemporary Bamako in general, and its music scene in particular. It’s an important work, less for what it says about a given set of musical styles than … Continue reading
What Mali’s recent past reveals about its present woes, Part 2: Of chiefs, slaves, and “paranoid nationalism”
In his recent book From Empires to NGOs in the West African Sahel, historian Gregory Mann describes how state sovereignty was fashioned in the Sahel following the end of colonial rule. In the previous post, we discussed his concept of … Continue reading
What Mali’s recent past reveals about its present woes, Part 1: The road to nongovernmentality
These days the sovereignty of the Malian state looks more hypothetical than ever. The government’s control over its northern regions ranges from tenuous to nonexistent. Kidal has been firmly under the rule of Tuareg separatists for two years, while only … Continue reading
Book review: Can Judd Ryker save Malian democracy?
There are not a great many novels set in Mali. The country has had its own small literary scene since the 1950s, featuring writers like Amadou Hampâté Bâ, Massa Makan Diabaté, Moussa Konaté, and Yambo Ouologuem. Maryse Condé’s Segu (1987) and … Continue reading
What threat from Mali’s Islamist groups?
Last month British Prime Minister David Cameron said Islamist terrorist groups in North Africa pose a significant threat to global stability. The Islamist presence in Algeria and Mali, he said, is “linked to al-Qaeda, it wants to destroy our way … Continue reading