In the 1960s, there was an African ambition to build modern states based on ‘national development’. But in the late 1980s, national development was dismissed - in most cases under compulsion from the international financial institutions. And without national development project, there are really no states in Africa, only regimes. In the Sahel, this paved the way for the establishment of the ‘Islamic state’.
Since 2021, the government of Benin has been battling a violent jihadist insurgency in the north of the country, fueled by a complex mix of political marginalization, religious ideology and long-simmering intercommunal conflicts. Unfortunately, in doing so, it is repeating the same tragic mistakes made over the past decade by its West African neighbors, Mali and Burkina Faso.
Cet article s’appuie sur des recherches menées par l’Initiative mondiale contre la criminalité transnationale organisée (GI-TOC) dans le cadre du projet OCWAR-T. OCWAR-T est un projet en soutien à la Commission de la Cédéao, financé par l’Union européenne et le ministère fédéral allemand des Affaires étrangères, et coordonné par la Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ). Le rapport complet peut être trouvé ici.
Islam West Africa Collection (IWAC), created and maintained by F. Madore, is an open-access database that provides access to press clippings from the mainstream press in West African (Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Benin, Togo, Niger, Nigeria) as well as Islamic publications, and video recordings, all of those documents related to Islam. Complex tools enable discourse analysis and answer various scientific questions through keywords mapping, topic modelling, sentiment analysis and spatial visualization.
