Tuareg Rebellion Mali MNLA

The ultimate outcome of ultranationalism is the disappearance of the state altogether, and its replacement by power structures that do not recognize any form of democratic control by the very people these structures affect. Nor do these structures restrict themselves to what used to be known as national borders. This reality of globalism after the annihilation of the nation-state forms a dark and perverted version of that other dream of decentralized powers that reaches beyond the nation-state: the progressive project of stateless internationalism. I will introduce here a number of examples of the infrastructures proposed by groups advocating for different practices of stateless internationalism. These examples are gathered from my work as founder of the New World Summit—an artistic and political organization that develops parliaments for stateless and blacklisted organizations—and as cofounder (with BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht) of the New World Academy, where stateless political groups have developed collaborative projects with artists and students, exploring the role of art in political struggles for representation. The aim of the New World Academy is to investigate artistic practice in relation to the stateless state, with the concept of “state” referring as much to a condition as to an administrative structure.

Tourism to indigenous populations is criticised as a form of modern colonialism, because the dominating tourist culture might overwhelm the so called fragile indigenous culture. This ethical research tries to evaluate this assertion on the example of tourism to the Tuareg-nomads in the region of Agadez, Republic of Niger, West Africa, Central Sahara. Therefore, interviews haven been done with a large number of local tour operators, tourists and the concerned Tuareg population of the Tuareg village of Timia in the central Aïr Mountains. The reconstructed structures and dynamics of the regional tourism development have been evaluated by an ethical model which is based on the principles of cybernetics and of sustainable development.
The ethical evaluation can proof, that tourism to Agadez in its present form doesn't destabilize the regional structures, even if there is a strong and sometimes even hostile concurrence between the Tuareg tour operators. Nevertheless tourism is an important economical factor of integration as the region suffers from unemployment, poverty and drought. By the population of Timia, tourism is seen as a tool to find contact to Europeans, who love to support this "idyllic but starving" village.
Obviously, the Tuareg from Timia have learnt to take advantage of those who are looking for an exotic, but endangered world to save.
Finally, most of the so found indicators don't support the assertion that tourisms to Tuareg nomads in the Agadez region could be a significant factor of its destabilization or something worse.

Reisen zu indigenen Kulturen sind umstritten, weil diese im Vergleich zur Tourismuskultur als fragil und somit als gefährdet gelten.
Die Richtigkeit dieser Hypothese wird am Beispiel von Tourismus zu Tuareg-Nomaden in der Region Agadez, Zentralsahara, überprüft. Dazu wurden die historischen, politischen, ökonomischen und kulturellen Rahmenbedingungen und Entwicklungsprozesse der Region als auch der Bevölkerung des Bergdorfes Timia untersucht. Im Zentrum der empirischen Untersuchungen standen die Strukturen der regionalen Tourismusentwicklung, wozu regionale Agenturbetreiber und Sahara-Touristen befragt wurden. Als Methode dienten Befragungen und Kataloganalysen. Als Evaluationsmaßstab wurde das System einer kybernetischen Ethik entwickelt, die sich an die Prinzipien der "nachhaltigen Entwicklung" anlehnt. Besonderes Augenmerk galt auch der ideologiekritischen Analyse des Tuareg-Mythos.
"Tuareg-Tourismus" wird überwiegend von urbanisierten Tuareg-Nomaden und einstigen Tuareg-Rebellen betrieben. Charakteristika der Tourismusstruktur sind ein weitgehend ungelenktes Tourismuswachstum, intensives Konkurrenzverhalten und geringe interkulturelle Qualifikation des Personals. Die Region leidet unter Arbeitslosigkeit und Dürren, weshalb die ökonomische Rolle des Tourismus signifikant ist, doch diese Einkommenschance trägt auch zu inneren Konflikten bei. Insofern weist Tourismus sowohl stabilisierende als auch destabilisierende Tendenzen auf.
Die Evaluation einer Rundreise konnte keine wesentlichen soziokulturellen und ökologischen Belastungen nachweisen. Die Belastungen des gesamten Tourismusaufkommens, maximal 4.000 Personen pro Jahr, halten sich aufgrund des großen Reisegebiets in Grenzen.
Die Befragung der Bewohner der Bergoase Timia ergab, dass Tourismus als willkommene Einkommensalternative sowie als Mittel betrachtet wird, um Entwicklungsprojekte zu requirieren. Dieser Haltung der Bevölkerung wird
vor dem Hinterrund der Transzendentalpragmatik und des Kulturalismus auf deren Legitimationskraft analysiert. Im Ergebnis kann die spezifische Form des Tuareg-Tourismus als vertretbar nachgewiesen werden, weil in seiner gegenwärtigen Form die stabilisierenden Effekte dominieren. Die Kritik am Tuareg-Tourismus wird zum Teil als Ausdruck exotisierender Projektionen entlarvt.

AARMS Vol. 12, No. 2 (2013) 247–271.

In 2012 the seemingly stable country of Mali experienced a sudden collapse, this along with the declaration of independence of the brand new Tuareg state, the massive spread of extreme Islamism shocked the international community. Initial disbelief gave way to the UN Security Council’s resolution to restore Mali’s territorial integrity. Fueled by the fear of a greater and bloodier conflict and its overspill, limited military operations began. Along with the Economic Community of West African State–led operation, the country’s former colonial master, France, began its own controversial military operation. Many people think that by doing so, France is trying to prove itself a great power and able to intervene on the world political stage according to its own diplomatic interest and being a force to contend with. Others however think that France is facing another Indochina-like fiasco in Mali. Who is right, will be determined by the failure or the success of the current operations and by the results of the restoration afterward. In this paper I would like to clarify the reasons for the events taking place in the country, their dynamics and possible consequences.
keywords: Mali, AQIM, Boko Haram, Tuareg, Azawad, rebellion, France, USA, European Union, peacekeeping, Operation Serval,

The names of the insurgent groups include historical, cultural, ethnic, territorial and doctrinal references
that appear too specific to be considered accidental and thus could be indicative of their strategy. The
examples of terrorist attacks carried out by these groups support this argument, as they adopted or
changed their name beforehand, shortly before a spinoff group, a new alliance or an offshoot emerged,
or when an attack occurred in a non-traditional geographic area of action. Unfortunately, too often mass
media and government officials utilise incorrect and/or superficial translations of these names, thus
contributing to a lack of detailed information on the jihadists. The etymological analysis of the Arabic
names of the Sahelian jihadist insurgents intends to and contributes to increase the knowledge on the
nature and actions of these groups.

Following the relative democratization of African societies in the 1990s, several countries found themselves caught in the grip of po litical instability, rising ethno-nationalist claims, and ethnically-based insurgent movements calling for autonomy or independence. Thus, the advent of democracy in these countries paradoxically sparked a new wave of nationalist conflicts that are being waged along the lines of ethnic or clan-based loyalties. The very expression of democratic participation is now being corroded by the rise of ethno- nationalist and separatist discourses. In Niger, since the advent of democracy in 1991, the ethnicization of political life has often taken a violent form, both by way of the emergence of autonomous, independent Tuareg armed rebellions who directly challenge the authority of the state, its republican structure and democratic, centralized model, and by way of ethnically-based Tuareg political parties who oppose this same authority’s jacobin structure. In this paper, it is argued that these claims, in their various forms, show that democratization does not automatically result in the inclusion of minorities or the automatic acceptance by minorities of democratic participation or even of democratic ethno-pluralism within the boundaries of a unified state.

La conflictividad en Mali representa un ejemplo más de las guerras intraestales de la posguerra fría compuesta por multitud de variables de fricción y actores que afrontan las diferencias mediante mecanismos violentos. La respuesta internacional ha consistido en la diplomacia o en la formación de misiones de paz sobre el terreno para revertir la violencia y sustituir las respuestas violentas por mecanismos pacíficos de resolución de conflictos. Estas misiones, cada vez más complejas, abarcan todas las dimensiones del Estado como herramientas para su transformación y consolidación. La idea es que la actividad reformista conlleve una mejor gobernanza y así se afiance la legitimidad de las nuevas instituciones. Esto quiere decir que la consolidación del Estado y su legitimación social son los objetivos que se marcan para avanzar hacia la consolidación de la paz. El presente trabajo pretende profundizar en el marco expuesto en esta introducción: la situación del conflicto en Mali, el papel de la misión de paz de las Naciones Unidas y las posibilidades para la consolidación de la paz. Por el momento se podría afirmar que estamos en los estadios iniciales de la consolidación de la paz en un marco todavía inestable y complejo para su consecución.

Although the 2012 takeover of northern Mali by a coalition of jihadi groups (including Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, Ansar Dine and the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa) caught much of the world by surprise, armed jihadism had been present on Malian territory for several years. Malians harbor widely divergent views of these groups and the threat they pose to the Malian state. To analyze this range of views and interpret what they suggest about the place of armed jihadism in Malian society, I examine social surveys and media discourse since the onset of Mali's present crisis.

The thesis classifies cases of majoritarian and power-sharing democracy in plural societies. The research questions are: How are democratic regimes in plural societies articulated? Which dimensions can grasp the institutional varieties and practical performances of political regimes in ethnically divided democracies? What is the effect of majoritarian institutions in plural democracies, in terms of ethnic inclusion and exclusion?
Accordingly, I shall map 47 plural democracies through 18 variables along 2 institutional dimensions: (i) majoritarianism or power-sharing in the government, parliament and electoral system and (ii) the territorial articulation of power. I shall then add another dimension on (iii) regime quality related to group relations: ethnic inclusion or exclusion. This framework, coupling de jure institutions with de facto performances, proves that: (i) power-sharing democracy is associated with ethnic inclusion; nonetheless (ii) majoritarian democracy occurs in plural societies and can coexist with ethnic inclusion.
A simple quantitative analysis is insufficient to explain this pattern. I will thence conduct a most similar comparison of 2 majoritarian democracies of my sample – Turkey (majoritarian/ exclusive) and Mali (majoritarian/inclusive) – to confirm that: (i) majoritarian institutions in plural societies often lead to ethnic exclusion, albeit (ii) this scenario can be avoided when exogenous factors are at play (party system, political culture/tradition of accommodation). However, as the diachronic analysis will show, these factors remain precarious and (iii) majoritarian institutions, in particular the centralization of power, are demonstrated to be ill-suited to deal with territorially concentrated minorities.
The thesis offers a detailed and useful classification and discusses examples of majority rule and power-sharing in plural democracies, and finally proposes further research directions, including authoritarianism and regime change.

It seems that the process in which a state exists in a permanent mode of questioning its own history, language, symbols, and the very meaning of a “people” can only exist in the revolutionary practice of the stateless state. This condition of permanent revolution is contrary to the monopolization of power that is necessary for a state to naturalize itself into permanence. It resists the very concept of the “national.” In traditional national liberation movements, the art of creating a state is based on a population redefining itself from a communalist point of view. The natural endpoint is the monopolizing of state structures. As Jolle Demmers has pointed out, this final process inevitably creates new minorities and new stateless entities. Demmers describes a cycle of violence inherent to the very idea of the state. This brings us to the question of what a liberation movement that renounces the very concept of the state could be.

Friedensabkommen bei denen die Hauptparteien abwesend sind, deren Vermittler nur seine Vorteile im Auge hat, und die unter der Aufsicht einer internationalen Staatengemeinschaft abgehalten werden, deren Bemühungen lediglich ein Lippenbekenntnis darstellen, sind wohl nur als Farce zu bezeichnen.

This article investigates four case studies in Sub Saharan Africa (Madagascar, Malawi, Mali and Niger) that made the successful transition to democracy in the early 1990s within the global ‘Third Wave.’ Alas, all cases reverted to authoritarianism within some years. The author analyses the root causes of the democratic collapse by looking at three different dimensions of ‘stateness.’ Based on C. T. Call’s theoretical framework the author assesses how a legitimacy gap led to the erosion of the democratic institutions, or how capacity or security gap provoked regime collapse. The article’s findings hope to shed some more light on the crisis of democracy consolidation in weak states in Sub Saharan Africa.

The new French documentary Les Salafistes (The Salafis) that pre-miered January 26, 2016, in a small number of French theaters offers iconographic imagery seldom seen in the public space: a string of interviews with some of the leading jihadist militants in Mali, Tunisia, Algeria, and Iraq coupled with ghastly images of violence perpetrated by militant groups. The intention appears to be to show the irrationality of and paradox in the jihadis' discourse and actions. Unfortunately, the directors have succeeded only in reproducing already existing stereotypes of Salafis. The lack of any appropriate contextualization that problematizes the recent rise of violence in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region is perhaps the film's major flaw. Despite the directors' ambition to let violent extremists discredit their own project, the documentary presents an essentialist argument that reproduces Orientalist imageries of a savage religion. Without the appropriate commentary and background overview to the conflicts featured in the film, the audiences are left alone with an extremist narrative that confirms the evocations of the West's moral, cultural, and political superiority over the East.

The military intervention in Libya in 2011 has sparked an intensive debate about the success of the operation and reopened several discussions on humanitarian intervention and the responsibility to protect. In this article, we posit that military intervention in a multi-ethnic state can exacerbate differences between groups and spark new social movements, originating from minority groups in search for empowerment and recognition. In addition, we argue that aggressive and precipitate military interventions produce systemic shocks whose effects, rather than being contained, tend to spread, affecting neighboring countries. To demonstrate these assumptions, we focus primarily on the Tuareg minority groups, analysing how the NATO intervention affected the initiation of their new process of self-determination.

El 21 de marzo de 2012, a apenas un mes de las elecciones, un golpe de Estado militar derrocó al régimen malí, abriéndose un periodo de incertidumbre política. El principal detonante de la intentona golpista fue el conflicto armado que desde enero enfrentaba al ejército malí contra el tuareg Movimiento Nacional para la Liberación de la Azawad (MNLA), quien finalmente el 6 de abril era proclamada la independencia de la Azawad.