Militarism and its limits: Sociological insights on security assemblages in the Sahel

Abstract

This article assesses the concepts of militarism and militarization in relation to contemporary security interventions in the Sahel, a region increasingly understood through the prisms of violence, cross-border illicit flows, and limited statehood. This region is subject to security interventions that include French military action, EU-funded projects to prevent drug trafficking, and both bilateral and multilateral efforts against irregular migration. To many observers, it is experiencing an ongoing militarization. We argue that while the inextricable concepts of militarism and militarization go some way towards explaining interventions’ occasional use of military violence, they are limited in their grasp of the non-martial and symbolic violence in security practices. We instead propose a focus on assemblages of (in)security to show the heterogeneous mix of global and local actors, and often contradictory rationalities and practices that shape the logics of symbolic and martial violence in the region. Throughout, the article draws on the authors’ fieldwork in Mauritania, Senegal, and Niger, and includes two case studies on efforts against the Sahel’s ‘crime–terror nexus’ and to control irregular migration through the region. The article’s contribution is to better situate debates about militarism and militarization in relation to (in)security and to provide a more granular understanding of the Sahel’s security politics.

Impact of Domestic and Transboundary Conflicts on Militarization

“…The above results and analysis show the worldwide trends and impacts of Cohesion variables on Militarization as studied by the previous researchers (Dowler, 2012& Frowd, 2018. Middle/Lower Incomes countries' Militarization expenses have been positively impacted by internal & external violence, ethnic diversity & conflicts, political grouping and instability with demographic pressure (Jacob, 2014& Kindersley, 2019.…”

“…Moreover, it triggers a sense of security and unrestricted freedom with protection(Flint, 2009& Loyd, 2010. Due to this linkage between the two terms, researchers have studied them simultaneously in different contexts of security & conflicts in different regions with the deployment of various strategies and techniques(Baaz, 2018;Frowd, 2018;Davis, 2019& MacLeish, 2020. Studies also focused on Militarization's impact on the socio-economic situation of…”

Global security assemblages: mapping the field

“…The exclusion of the terror-crime nexus when analyzing security assemblage at certain locations can cause significant alteration of the results and limit understanding of dynamics and actors relevant in certain security contexts. For instance, Frowd and Sandor (2018) demonstrated this to be relevant in the Sahel case, but certainly, this is applicable in many others. As mentioned above, expansion of what is considered a relevant private actor (i.e., commercial private security company) a decade ago, is much wider now when there are, besides local groups and traditional leaders, also other groups that contribute -positively and/or negatively -to the security environment locally.…”

Long term trends across security and development in the Sahel

“…Concerns over the deteriorating security situation have led to calls for co-ordinated regional action, to which Sahelian governments have quickly responded. The French military intervention in Mali sparked several international efforts to counter terrorist groups, which today is perhaps most evident in the military build-up that the French operation accelerated (Frowd and Sandor, 2018). However, the aftermath of the intervention proved to be a fluid and changing scenario that regional governments quickly identified as a major risk to larger regional stability and thus requiring a regional solution.…”