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The Postcolonial African State in Transition offers a new perspective on a set of fundamental, albeit old questions with salient contemporary resonance: what is the nature of the postcolonial state? How did it come about? And more crucially, the book poses an often neglected question: what was the postcolonial African state internally built against? Through a detailed historical investigation of the Voltaic region, the book theorizes the state in transition as the constitutive condition of the African state, rendering centralization processes as always transient, uncertain, even dangerous endeavors. In Africa and elsewhere in the colonial and postcolonial world, the centralized sovereign state has become something of a meta-model that bears the imprint of necessity and determinism. This book argues that there is nothing natural, linear, conventional or intrinsically consensual about the centralized state form. In fact, the African state emerged, and was erected against, and at the expense of a variety of authority structures and forms of self-governance. The state has sustained itself through destructive practices, internal colonization, and in fact the production and alienation of a range of internal others

The paper argues that the dominant geopolitical analysis draws from a tradition of thought that privileges a geographical approach to space. The process that extends such impetus most compellingly can be found in security intervention. Interventionism, specifically under the War on Terrorism (WoT) thinking projects a cartography of (in)security and threat that disrupts on the one hand existing dynamics of space production and on another redefines space as geography with violent consequences for a variety of life-forms. The question that guides my endeavor is the following: how does a rethinking of the geographical question in international relations (IR), particularly with regards to intervention and the WoT enable us to expand an understanding of geopolitics beyond power struggles over space? Thinking from the Sahel-Sahara region, I wish to offer an alternative view of space where life, government, intellectual representations, commerce, culture, landscape, and belief lead to different kinds of relationships. This view is meant to suggest the beginning of the sketching of different systems of thought and morals through which to apprehend more productively a notion of space in IR.

An examination of the figure of the slave and the figure of migrant make visible important historical interconnections that sustain past and present elaborations of the human and 'the international'. These interconnections have always been racialised and they have structurally constituted the making of an interdependent world community. A series of instrumentalised discourses, at times turned into rationalities that govern policies towards migrants, particularly in a post 9/11 context, increasingly normalises the idea that there are people that can be justifiably expelled from the civic/civil, and increasingly human sphere. The slave was forcefully removed, both physically from attachment to kin and land, and morally from the history of humankind. The migrant is pushed out of the bounds of the livable as well as the moral category of rights-bearer. The commonalities that configure both phenomena are rooted in an extractive supply economy and a hierarchised ordering of humans. The article uses the history of Frederick Douglas to show that the absence of 'care' as methodology of relationality limits the valence of interdependence as a marker of a globalised world. In doing so, it challenges the unexamined assumptions of new/posthumanism that advocates radical interdependence without interrogating the modalities of 'humanity' among different categories of humans.

This article argues that location, as both geography and epistemology, can be a place of innovation in the discipline of international relations (IR). Specifically, it suggests that a re-appropriation of IR as a product of a global history in which the Global South, in general, and Africa, in particular, played an important role can help displace the moral and historical centrality of Western theory where it has failed to give credence to 'peripheral' experience and social thought. This belief coincides with a commonsense according to which the production of knowledge is by necessity inseparable from the intellectual conventions, traditions and lineages of the place of production. This means that African universities in particular have the opportunity to generate new perspectives in IR based on the analyses of the historical events that marked the life of the continent. In this manner, thinking and teaching IR in Africa would consist of revisiting the received truths about the evolution of the international order and society by revising their historical underpinnings, where necessary, and by interrogating the 'unit-ideas' that structure disciplinary impulses.

Nonstate transnational actors have long played a central role in Sahelian economic structures and geopolitical arrangements because of their capacity to constitute sources of authority and sustenance outside and across state structures. Recently, subversive battalions (qatiba) have resorted to kidnapping, raiding, and ransoming as a means to social justice with a redistributive dimension. Parallels can be drawn with authority structures associated with nineteenth-century privateers and buccaneers, and more recently with pirates operating in the Indian Ocean. The parallel economy of ransoming emerges in a context of critical disruptions of traditional economic and mobility frameworks in the Sahel, the aggressive scramble for resources, and the displacement of the global war on terror in the Sahel. This article examines the legitimation processes used by subversive groups, both ideological and religious; the ethics of ransoming as a form of prosperity endeavor without morality; and an oscillation between cooperation and subversion in the parallel economy of smuggling understood as two aspects of the same strategy of engagement between formal authorities and insubordinate groups in a context of scarcity. It argues that nonconventional forms of ransoming and criminal predation in the Sahel have similarities with practices of states and multinational corporations insofar as these divest ordinary citizens of their ability to become subjects outside the colluding forces of capital, state power, and external interventions.

Nonstate transnational actors have long played a central role in Sahelian economic structures and geopolitical arrangements because of their capacity to constitute sources of authority and sustenance outside and across state structures. Recently, subversive battalions (qatiba) have resorted to kidnapping, raiding, and ransoming as a means to social justice with a redistributive dimension. Parallels can be drawn with authority structures associated with nineteenth-century privateers and buccaneers, and more recently with pirates operating in the Indian Ocean. The parallel economy of ransoming emerges in a context of critical disruptions of traditional economic and mobility frameworks in the Sahel, the aggressive scramble for resources, and the displacement of the global war on terror in the Sahel. This article examines the legitimation processes used by subversive groups, both ideological and religious; the ethics of ransoming as a form of prosperity endeavor without morality; and an oscillation between cooperation and subversion in the parallel economy of smuggling understood as two aspects of the same strategy of engagement between formal authorities and insubordinate groups in a context of scarcity. It argues that nonconventional forms of ransoming and criminal predation in the Sahel have similarities with practices of states and multinational corporations insofar as these divest ordinary citizens of their ability to become subjects outside the colluding forces of capital, state power, and external interventions. Adapted from the source document.

Le Sahel connaît des crises structurelles sur lesquelles les acteurs formels n'ont guère de prise. La diffusion des printemps arabes vers le sud du continent a accéléré et intensifié son intégration dans les processus mondiaux, au point que la stabilité de la région tout entière s'en trouve menacée. L'incapacité des États sahéliens à innover sur le plan de la gouvernance et à satisfaire les attentes de leurs populations, conjuguée à la ruée sur les ressources naturelles, la radicalisation religieuse et l'« importation » de tensions extérieures, notamment, sont à l'origine de l'avènement d'une nouvelle ère mondiale où des griefs locaux trouvent une tribune internationale.