NM's blog

Excerpts The coup in August 2020 was welcomed by a population tired of the corruption and incompetence of Ibrahim Boubacar Keita’s government.  But the new regime grew increasingly hardline and eventually banned political parties in May 2025. Most opposition figures are now in exile, notably the imam Mahmoud Dicko, who leads from Algiers the Coalition of Forces for the Republic, set up in December 2025, and the communist Oumar Mariko, president of the now dissolved African Solidarity for Democracy and Independence party, who tried unsuccessfully to mediate with JNIM to secure the release of 17 hostages in March 2026. Even so, the regime still retains some popular support. ‘The jihadists have failed to stir up the population as they’d hoped,’ says Senegalese journalist Abdou Khadre Cissé. Spending on military equipment and security is draining state finances, prompting new taxes on mobile phone top-ups and money transfers via phone. In jihadist-dominated areas, people endure rackete...

The junta belt Image via  Colonel Assima Goita  on X.

It is like that ‘motto’ we heard a few times after 9/11 2001: “We have to fight them there, so they don’t come here.” Paying Africa’s brutal militias to lock up migrants

This piece requires a long breath and focus. “A feature of the Western ‘war on terror’ that seems to come out of fable rather than reality is an inability to see the enemy. In fact, it is an inability to define the enemy. In the Sahel, the French state has settled on ‘Islamist terrorists’, a sequence of adjectives that denote elusive subjects surging out of horizons of pure violence. The inability is compounded by the fact that terrorists must be picked out in terrains unknowable to the West, because the West has long considered them—still considers them—to be outside of history: Afghanistan, a redoubt against empires, those makers of history; the Sahel, a land somewhere in the continent that Hegel banished from history. “The Sahel of [Serge] Michailof and other Western experts epitomizes the trifecta of alien  demographic vitality, Islamic fanaticism and pauper migration that is the new spectre haunting the West.”

This  article requires individual or institutional subscription. Here is an excerpt: “ The West’s focus on armed violence gets in the way of understanding the phenomena of radicalisation and the commission of acts in its name. It presupposes a continuum between religious radicalisation, proclamation of jihad and international terrorism, as though going from the first to the third stage were inevitable, and conversely, as though international terrorism   created   local jihadism. Such reasoning leads to any reference to sharia law and any call for holy war being read as a precursor to global attacks. In this view, Islamist movements’ supposed proximity to terrorism is the sole criterion for determining western policy towards them. This proximity is defined on a scale of intensity that measures references to religion as much as — if not more than — actual acts of violence: the more Islamist groups mention sharia and the more they challenge the policies of the great powers,...

 Macron’s Wars

A defeat of an imperialist state is always a good news. Macron’s signals military pullback from Sahel Related: “When they attack us in France, we say it’s Islam.” The arrogance of French imperialism vs. the pragmatism of the local regimes