Attacks on the Burkina Faso army headquarters and the French Embassy on 2 March 2018 were better organised, involved heavier weapons and were more sustained than anything seen so far in Burkina Faso. In this Q&A, our West Africa Program Director Rinaldo Depagne says the jihadist assault further exposes worrying weakness in the Burkinabé security forces.
In a troubled region, Burkina Faso is a rare example of religious diversity and tolerance. But a perceived discrepancy between a significant number of Muslims and their low level of public representation has created tensions. To safeguard Burkina's model of peaceful coexistence, the government must address this sensitive issue through careful reforms, particularly in the education system.
Jihadist violence in the West African Sahel has now spread to the north of Burkina Faso. The response of Ouagadougou and its partners must go beyond the obvious religious and security dimensions of the crisis, and any solution must take into account deep-rooted social and local factors.
Burkina Faso is an exception in the Sahel in that no politicisation and ideological radicalisation of Islam has taken shape in the public space. This paper – the first version of a chapter in an upcoming book – analyses both the causes and the implications of this fact. The historical analysis of the formative process of the Burkinabe nation reveals that Islamisation is a recent development in the country as compared to other parts of the Sahel. It came about as a result of the colonial transformation of societies in the area of future Burkina Faso, in the first half of the twentieth century and progressed in competition with Catholicism. While Islam later became the country's majority religion, the singular aspects of Burkina Faso's history – again, relative to its neighbours – have created a society marked by religious pluralism, and a very specific form of ‘consensual secularism.' In this context, an Islamic public space has emerged where various doctrinal currents – modernist reformists, Wahhabis, Sufis – struggle to assert themselves, but which leads to an enduring combination of subordination to and partnership with Burkina's successive regimes, especially as influential Muslim merchants largely control the all-important trade economy of the country. This result does not imply that Muslims in Burkina are politically quiescent, but that they tend to mobilise politically not as Muslims, but as citizens of Burkina, as is testified by the country's stormy political history. The case therefore teaches us to avoid essentialising Muslims' existence in the political arena.
The Global Center on Cooperative Security is pleased to announce the publication of the report, "Preventing Violent Extremism in Burkina Faso: Toward National Resilience Amid Regional Insecurity." The report is coauthored by Profs. Augustin Loada (Executive Director of the Ouagadougou-based Centre pour la Gouvernance Democratique) and Peter Romaniuk (Senior Fellow at the Global Center in New York). At a time when violent extremism in West Africa and the Sahel is at the top of the regional and international agenda, the report assesses the threat to Burkina Faso and surveys sources of resilience. The report finds that Burkina Faso is vulnerable to violent extremism but the threat is not imminent, while arguing that stakeholders (the Government of Burkina Faso, its international partners and civil society groups) should take steps to prevent the emergence of violent extremism and build resilience.
The report was formally launched on Thursday 12 June at the United Nations in New York at a side event during the biannual review of the UN Global Counterterrorism Strategy. Speakers at the event included H.E. Dr. Jerôme Bougouma (Minister of Territorial Administration and Security, Government of Burkina Faso), H.E. Mr. Ib Petersen (Permanent Representative, Permanent Mission of Denmark to the UN), Mr. Jehangir Khan (Director, UN Counter-Terrorism Implementation Task Force) and Prof. Loada. The report follows the publication by the Global Center in 2012 of "Countering Violent Extremism and Promoting Community Engagement in West Africa and the Sahel: An Action Agenda." The report was supported by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark.
Le renouveau démocratique que connaît le Bénin depuis la conférence des forces vives de la nation de février 1990 a ouvert la voie à la démocratisation de l'éducation avec au centre des débats, la question des in put et des out put des formations. Dès lors, aux côtés des structures publiques d'enseignement, émergent des établissements privés aussi bien profanes que confessionnels rivalisant les uns les autres sur la qualité des formations dispensées. Les établissements d'enseignement islamiques participent-ils à cette dynamique d'ajustement et de restructuration du système éducatif ? En essayant de répondre à cette question fondamentale, le présent article s'inscrit au cœur de l'un des débats qui ont lieu dans les pays ouest-africaines à majorité musulmane : la question de l'éducation en milieu musulman. L'objectif principal est de montrer le rôle social des écoles coraniques traditionnelles face aux écoles arabes contemporaines dans un contexte socio-économique marqué par le chômage et le fondamentalisme. Des données collectées et traitées par le biais de la double approche historique et socio-antroplogique et des techniques/outils appropriés sur un échantillon représentatif de 21 personnes, du décryptage des ouvrages en arabe et en français, ont permis de tenter de répondre à la question. Il en ressort que les écoles coraniques ont constituées d'importants creusets séculaires d'éducation et de reproduction des agents polyvalents de développement en milieux musulmans sous la bannière des alfas soufis. Sans soutien et victimes d'une compétition déloyale de la part des écoles arabes portées par une élite arabisante d’obédience wahhabite, elles disparaissent progressivement comme une peau de chagrin. Les écoles arabes par contre, d'émergence récente, apparaissent comme des établissements de formation d'une nouvelle catégorie d'intellectuels délaissés et promoteur d'un islam fondamentaliste. Elles connaissent un rayonnement spectaculaire grâce au soutien financier des pétrodollars arabes.
The minority status of the Ahmadiyya is linked to the doctrine of this movement, described by some as heterodox, by others as non-Islamic, but also in connection to their minority demographics, whether in Burkina Faso, the country under scrutiny here, or within the overall Muslim population. The article examines the special case of the Ahmadiyya to answer general issues regarding the transnational expansion of Muslim minorities and their use of media in the struggle for recognition and participation in national public spheres. The description of the iconographic aesthetics of this Muslim missionary minority, in particular the use of the portraits of the charismatic leaders, is used to analyse the challenges of its self-representation towards the Muslim majority worldwide. The analysis of Ahmadiyya's iconographic discourse highlights that the charismatic aesthetics makes individuals sense the power of the caliphate in their intimacy. It also emphasises the tensions related to their mediatised selfrepresentation.
