Mali. The Missing Structural Factor

On 25 April 2026, Mali faced its most severe test in fourteen years. Coordinated JNIM and FLA attacks struck seven major population centres including Kati, Mopti, Gao, and Kidal, as documented in previous articles on African Arguments.

Institutional silence is part of the structural picture. Inaction by the Alliance of Sahelian States (Alliance des états sahelien) is often read as evidence of the alliance’s weakness. But Niger and Burkina Faso are already fighting terrorism on the ground in extremely difficult conditions. Meanwhile, no regional or continental institution has taken preventive steps. ECOWAS has done nothing despite its formal regional security commitments. The African Union has not convened an emergency session, has not issued public statements, has not initiated any political action.

Behind this picture of inaction lies a structural gap. Existing analytical frameworks systematically miss one important factor in assessing the Malian crisis.

Standard analysis of the Malian crisis operates through several recognisable frameworks. Climate and demographic pressure. The colonial legacy. The weakness of postcolonial state institutions and corruption. Cyclical Tuareg rebellions since 1963 and the influx of Libyan weapons after 2011, as well as the rising ideological dynamics of Salafism and jihadism.

What is missed is institutional inclusivity as a structural category. Not rhetoric about unity and tolerance. A concrete system of political representation through which rent flows naturally circulate across the territory and a supra-ethnic identity is formed as the structural outcome of a working system.

From the Colonial Legacy to Declarative Inclusivity

The French administration in Soudan français inherited the Bambara-oriented military-administrative structure of the Ségou Empire, inclusive within the sociocultural geography of the Middle Niger, integrating members of the Malinke, Soninke, parts of the Fulani, Songhai, and other southern groups through the system of slave-warriors who gained status through service.

Bambara – today Mali’s most widely spoken language – had spread historically spread across West Africa as a lingua franca for commerce. However, the Bambara military-administrative core operated within a much smaller area. After French colonization, the new colonial state extended the territory of this social system to the northern borders of the Sahara, formally including but not integrating groups historically outside the Bambara sociocultural system.

This military-ethnic and territorial infrastructure was inherited by the independent Malian state with the same limitations of historical inclusion. Modibo Keita’s (1960-68) nation-building project was built on the colonial foundation and through the mythology of continuity with the Mali Empire. It was shaped by the trauma of the federation with Senegal which dissolved in 1960 and the Tuareg rebellion of 1963. The structural cycle of rebellions and suppressions, reproducing itself over decades, shaped the exclusivity of the model through a concrete core of political power. All subsequent heads of state since 1960, despite ethnic diversity, came from one military-administrative structure of the central-southern regions. The history of attempts to integrate the north of Mali offers a chronicle of declarative inclusivity outside genuinely working mechanisms.

The Tamanrasset Accords of 6 January 1991 with the Mouvement Populaire de l’Azaouad and the Front Islamique Arabe under Algerian mediation were not implemented. The army was frustrated by concessions to the north. On 26 March 1991 a coup against President Moussa Traoré took place. A series of subsequent agreements also failed. The Pacte National of 11 April 1992 with the Mouvements et Fronts Unifiés de l’Azawad. The Algiers Accord of 4 July 2006 with the Alliance Démocratique du 23 Mai pour le Changement, and the Accords of 15 May and 20 June 2015 with the Coordination des Mouvements de l’Azawad coalition, including MNLA, HCUA, and the Platform.

Despite differences in scale and degree of formal implementation, these agreements shared similar structural problems. The integration of the north into the state circuit was blocked by deep political-economic asymmetry. Regional commissions and assemblies did not receive real powers. The monitoring mechanisms established remained nominal. The financial benefits of a political settlement only reached Tuareq elites, not the masses. This all generated mass resistance on both sides.

Many Tuareg factions and non-Tuareg northern groups, such as the sedentary Songhai communities, were in practice excluded from the agreements. Mass-level integration of the Tuareg into state institutions did not take place. Regional military quotas did not work. Mobility between regions remained limited.

One episode illustrates the structural nature of the failure. After the Pacte National in 1992, thousands of Tuareg combatants were nominally integrated into the Malian army. However, in 1994, three Tuareg movements called on their integrated combatants to leave the service. The military structures did not provide a real place. Delegitimisation flowed back through the same channels. This pattern was reproduced across all cycles of integration.

The nature of the southern agrarian rent also worked against northern integration. The agrarian economy of the south produced rent that could be distributed but did not create any structural economic interdependency between south and north. Money was extracted from the south and distributed to the north as a one-way transfer, leading to southern resistance and scepticism. Political settlements repeatedly broke down giving way to new rebellions in 1990, 2006, and 2012.

Rent Flows and Group Networks

Real multi-ethnicity in the Sahel exists through the economy in rent flows. The distribution of rent from resources, transit, taxation of commercial activity, and foreign aid runs through family networks, marriage alliances, local communities, and religious structures. The Mandinka and Wolof networks form a trading infrastructure that has worked for centuries. The Fulani network is a regional pastoral economy, including livestock trade and retail commerce in cities. The Tuareg network controls trans-Saharan routes and transit corridors.

When inclusive institutions work, rent flows circulate across the entire territory of the state. When they do not, the flows fragment. This is one of the markers of a failed state.

Mali has its own resource base as one of the largest gold producers in Africa, with the agrarian potential of the Niger and the transit corridors of the Sahel. But this base is structurally fragmented, and control over much of it has been lost by the state. Artisanal gold mining is partially shifting to JNIM, whereas northern transit is controlled by FLA. The agrarian potential is blocked by the collapse of security.

JNIM parasitises on this structural rupture. Analysis usually misses that JNIM is largely financed by its own activities, not through transnational channels. Through control over artisanal gold mining, protection payments levied on herder and traders, and informal taxes on local markets and transit. This is an alternative rent architecture that captures fragments of the economy fallen out of the state circuit. The structural mechanism works as a parallel social architecture, recruiting from those communities that are socially excluded.

Fulani as herders and Dogon as cultivators have been competing for pastures and water resources in Mopti and Bandiagara since the nineteenth century. The conflict has been intensifying since the 1990s through demographic pressure and the contraction of pastures. Since 2012, JNIM has been actively recruiting Fulani on this basis. Since 2015, rival Doon militias have been organising in response, in particular Dan Na Ambassagou.

A similar logic operates in the Ségou and Sikasso regions between Fulani and Bambara through the same mechanism: herders against cultivators.

Meanwhile, the FLA reproduces the Tuareg tradition of resistance through its economic base controlling trans-Saharan trade routes and artisanal gold mining. This is not separatism in the strict sense, but a demand for an autonomous institutional space for self-identification and integration into rent flows.

The paradox of the current Assimi Goïta government (2021-) is that it pursues anti-French political rhetoric, but it continues the French approach to the nation. The same logic of a unitary nation with a central political, economic, and cultural core is at work. Nevertheless, Goïta relies on military support from his southern Malian social base, with the absence of a mechanism for moderating ethnic conflicts.

The Malian crisis in this sense is a mirror. It shows that without a transition from declarations to hard, working mechanisms of power and resource distribution at the national level, no regional or continental ‘solidarity’ will function. It will remain another layer of beautiful rhetoric beneath which the old game of elites continues.

Conclusion: Building Institutional Inclusivity

Institutional inclusivity is not pluralism and not assimilation. It is the capacity of the state to incorporate diverse regional and ethnosocial groups into common mechanisms of political participation, public service, and resource distribution. A structural framework with concrete rights, limits, and mechanisms, embedded in institutions independently of individual moral qualities. A working mechanism that exists independently of our assessments.

In the end, the creation of a real supra-ethnic identity requires not beautiful words about unity but hard, often painful political-economic engineering. Everything else is self-deception.

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