Sahel

Summary

Dominique Pagani links the Sahel to eastern Europe: in his view, the same Cold War continues in both, and war is the effect of the crisis of capitalism1. He argues that the victims of jihadism have multiplied since foreign troops arrived. In his account, this jihadism grew out of the destruction of Libya. He sees insecurity and the abandonment of gendarmes by the central government as the explanation for coups that the populations support12. On Niger, he takes up the Vietnam War formula "yellowing the corpses" and sees an ECOWAS intervention as a way of "blackening the corpses." He also denounces the silence of the media2. He prefers to speak of imperialism rather than colonialism, since colonialism is only one species of it. In his view the dominant element is the IMF, the World Bank and the European Union. He describes the geography of the Sahel, which he connects to Rousseau and to the sacred, and sees the AES as a second wave of independence3. He reads the Malian crisis in light of the Tuareg card played since the OAS and of the Katanga secession. He sees in it a refusal of an African "critical mass"4.

1. 1#8 Philosophising under threat27 Jan 2022
2. 2Niger special: should we “blacken the corpses”?7 Aug 2023
3. 3Sahelian Africa and imperialism: Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger23 Mar 2024
4. 4Mali: a response to Emmanuel Macron's remarks at the Africa Forward summit16 May 2026

Introduction produced automatically from the 5 sessions on this theme, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the sessions.