Governing Jihad in Africa: Ideology, Political Economy, and Violence – GOV-JIHAD

Since the collapse of the “Caliphate” of the Islamic State in the Levant, sub-Saharan Africa has been the next jihadi frontier, actively promoted as such by global jihadi networks.. This armed challenge has largely been analysed from the perspective of “violent extremism,” suggesting that jihadist armed groups produce new forms of violence, mobilisation, and governance that threaten African states in new ways. However, it is far from clear that jihadist armed groups have had such a revolutionary effect on contemporary conflict dynamics. Some insist that jihadist violence is very much in line with earlier forms of conflict. We, therefore, intend to unpack this assumption and ask: How (if at all) has jihadist ideology changed political, social, economic, and political dynamics across African conflicts?

Current scholarship is ill-equipped to answer this question. First, the dominance of jihadist brutal violence in analyses prevents many from recognizing these groups as grounded social and political phenomena. Second, Africanists are divided over whether local roots of conflict matter more than transnational linkages for these conflicts—a debate that hinders our understanding of how the global and local interact. Third, prior country-specific work makes it hard to compare systematically and effectively across contexts and generalise findings. Lastly, research has been hampered by the lack of reliable information, which creates limited if not prejudiced analyses.

This project will understand jihad as a social, economic, and political phenomenon and inquire how jihad governs and is governed in three different realms: how ideology shapes what jihadi armed groups value and try to impose systemically (norms), how ideology and pragmatism shape how they generate and use resources (spatial expansion and political economy), and how ideology and tactical imperatives shape how they fight (and against whom) (violence and counter-violence). This analytical effort requires an approach that takes the local and global into account. It proposes to gather a team of field researchers, supported for field research, and encouraged to do joint field research so as to encourage meaningful and empirically informed comparison. We will collect data through immersive fieldwork and archival work, using process tracing and historical analysis to analyse how ideology shapes conflict in three main areas, Mali and the Sahel region, Nigeria, and Mozambique.