Ransoming,Compensatory Violence,and Humanitarianism in the Sahel

Introduction

Since 2001, a security governance discourse has emerged and acquired a normative dimension in the way it has imposed an understanding of development as security or of security as a prerequisite to the practice of development. This conjoining of development and security arose concurrently with the common sense that underdevelopment breeds terror while development orients the attention of the potential pool of “radical militants” toward more productive activities. This understanding of the motivation of “local” nonnormativity and the determination to eradicate it as part of the control and containment of the “terror threat” has led to questionable policy choices. More worrisome is the use of the language of liberal humanitarianism as justification for violence against those who would engage in raiding, ransom, and similar acts, or pose any threat to Western interests, including the disruption of mining and other economic activities.

The result is that the global war on terror (GWoT) has taken on the character of interventions in “ungoverned” zones and similar approaches recycled from the era of colonial conquests. On one hand, a discourse of rights has come to justify aggressive interventionism even while it affirms a mission to protect the rights of populations subject to intervention. The implementation of human rights becomes problematic in that it often reproduces rights violations and has contributed to collateral dispossession of various sorts. Dissidents groups in Africa and elsewhere have responded to this discourse and practice through acts of sabotage and subversion, or through the “expropriation” of western assets and resources.

This article is concerned with the political economy, rather than the politics, of hostage taking in the Sahel. It is set against the backdrop of both the US and Western antiterror activities and long-standing conflicts between Sahelian governments and populations variously affected by mining activities and yet denied the benefits of foreign direct investment. In this environment, hostage taking, raiding, razzia, piracy, and ransoming are first understood by sympathetic compatriots and observers as a form of compensatory tax. Second, these practices amount to economic, but also political responses to the very condition of privation sustained by the combination of neo-colonialism, capitalism, securitized development, and liberal humanitarianism as many modes of intervention in the Sahel. In any case, hostage taking intensifies in the context of a submerged war between subversive groups on one hand and both Sahelian states and “international” forces on the other. The antagonisms between these two opposing groups have historically been understood in terms defined by states and “international” forces such as transnational corporations. Whatever its justifications, this normative stand obscures important dimensions of not only the extant political economy of the region but also the ethical predicates of razzia and ransoming. The lessons that might be learned from such perspectives are too valuable to be ignored.

The aim of this article is therefore to examine the ethics of legitimation of militant groups through arguments about redistributive justice. Furthermore, both capitalist expansionism and the extractive industry are widely experienced as a permanent aggression to Sahelian populations, their resources, their forms of life, and culture. Consequently, this article also seeks to assess the extent of external interventions in the Sahel and how these are made complex by a global drive to order, regularize, and govern mobility and lifestyles.

This analysis employs two approaches. The first consists of an examination of the ethics of ransoming as political violence. The second looks at the political economy of ransoming. An important point of discussion at the intersection of these two concerns is arguably the relationship between the ethical and the redistributive. This relationship becomes particularly salient in their geopolitical dimension and in the unprecedented manner in which the economics of resource extraction (i.e., extortion), international law, and human rights have become imbricated.

These particulars are in no way intended as a justification of terrorist violence or illegitimate modes of appropriation; they are rather meant to underscore the limits of common analyses of the nature of violence, the legitimacy of its use, the condition of its production, and its justification in the name of human rights. They are also meant to problematize and show the limits of traditional categories for thinking about the liberal paradigm of law, property, rights, and states in the midst of dissident formulations that do not quite fit in common categories.

Three case studies are intended to highlight the abovementioned points by demonstrating the combined effects of the acute imbrications of the economics of extraction and the expansion of the war on terror in resources-rich regions. The first case examines the far-reaching repercussions of the extension of the logic of the GWoT on Sahelian terrain, particularly how it reinforces a fiction of permanent crisis created and maintained through discourses and humanitarian ad hockery, which has opened the door to many human rights violations. Second, the Dakar rally example is meant to highlight the effects of the most “benign” touristic and sporty incursions in a region deemed to need more “international exposure.” Third, the Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co (Shell) is examined as an instance of the impunity of corporations, under international human rights law, for crimes that have dire repercussions for the livelihood of affected communities.

Raiding Economy: A Framework

Ransoming, raiding, razzia, buccaneering, piracy, and similar practices belong to an economic register characterized by the seizing of property of others through rapid and often violent means. It is a practice that is rife in both “legal” and “illegal” spheres, involving both “legal” and “illegal” actors. It is a practice common to the corporate world as much as the history of slavery, colonial conquest, and contemporary insurgency strategies. In West and North West Africa, supplies in slaves destined for the Trans-Saharan and the Trans-Atlantic trades were maintained through raiding systems that instilled much fear among targeted populations. During colonial conquests, a common argument was one of “adaptation” to the “barbaric” practices of nomadic African populations. The French in particular believed that the only way to crush the resistance of desertic populations was to undermine their very capacity to fight by launching surprise and deadly attacks against them.

In the formation of capital in the modern world generally, expropriation has historically been a key factor and strategy. Expropriation and raiding applied not only to the new world, but also to those parts of the world characterized by economies of extraction, more specifically political usurpation, resources exploitation, and the trading in human beings in Africa and in the colonies. It is a practice that has never ceased but has only taken different forms while acquiring a degree of legality under a free trade system.

The expansionism of mercantilist capital was underpinned by mutually supportive relations between capital and state power. Two aspects are of interest to me here. The first aspect relates to capitalist ventures pertaining to resource extraction. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, companies of privateers were constituted as public/private ventures cocommissioned by states and princes. Privateers stationed at colonial peripheries or in the environs of powerful empires and states. They swept the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans using letters of commission and lettres de marque provided by princes, transferring allegiances according to the geopolitical context. ¹ Their modus operandi oscillated between collaboration and subversion, their unconventional tactics giving them sufficient resources to threaten the colonies and the trades of empires. At the same time, piracy and privateering were often considered just and honorable “trades,” especially when they contributed to state enrichment and imperial consolidation. In fact, someone like Hobbes makes little distinction between states and buccaneers in the way in which companies of buccaneers were constituted through a covenant with the view of making profit out of their ventures. For Hobbes, it does not requires a great stretch of imagination to see “England’s relentless acts of colonial appropriation are acts of piracy. In other words, they are illegitimate acts of violence, which are legitimized through political and nationalistic propaganda.” ² In the Mediterranean Sea in particular, there was no discernible line between piracy, privateering, and trading for that matter. ³ Equally, there is nothing controversial in seeing similarities between the corrupt business practices of seventeenth- to nineteenth-century European, and especially British merchants and global public/private enterprises in Africa, Asia, and the New World, the acquisition of colonies, the expropriation of indigenous lands and resources, and the enslavement of peoples, with the unconventional activities of pirates. ⁴

Closer to our times in recent years, corporate raiding has also become a common occurrence particularly since the end of the 1990s and the early 2000s. Corporate takeovers created a predatory system in which professional predators acted in collusion with regulatory agencies, shareholders of target companies, the judiciary, and government bodies such as the police and inspection agencies, in enabling big corporations to buy out or to eat up smaller ones. In Russia in particular, loosely organized and more established groups were responsible for systematic and criminal seizures of property at the end of the 1990s. Legal loopholes were either created or exploited and they enabled corporate blackmail, hostile takeovers, and asset expropriation. ⁵ The declining importance of corporate raiding in the recent past is less a result of tighter regulation than the diminishing attractiveness of takeovers.

The heterogeneous contexts that produce a variety of raiding practices might provide little in the way of a common basis to a common practice, but they certainly point to possible paths to subversive readings of liberal politics as regards notions of property, law, rights, and legitimacy.

Raiding in the Sahel: A Brief History

Historically, the Sahel is a zone of fluid circulation and exchange. No single authority ever held sway over its territories and populations. Mobility was articulated around seasonal migrations, transhumance, trade, and the maintenance of extended social networks. Sahelian life is informed by a subsistence model organized around livestock herding, pastoralist transhumance, trade, and agriculture. The economic activities are made to adapt to a particular environment (desert, drought-prone, extreme seasonal variability, and precariousness). Complex economic, political, social, and cultural linkages have been central to strategies of survival under harsh environmental and climatic conditions since the Middle Ages and certainly since the Islamic conquests of North and North West Africa. Animal husbandry (goats, camels, and sheep) complemented agricultural production around oases and the two provided a basis for trade and other forms of exchange. There were alliances between sedentary and nomadic populations in the form of patron–client relations that fed into processes of differentiation and hierarchy among very diverse populations.

Given a permanent experience of extreme environmental uncertainty, Sahelians have devised “a highly flexible social system and an elaborate set of both individual and collective-based survival strategies” ⁶ informed by three principles: an ethics of solidarity, mechanisms of resource management systems, and the possibility of migration. These enabled diversification and redistribution of livestock within networks of allies and kin, irrigation, grazing, and storage systems. Alliances are at the heart of the moral economy thus constituted through social security networks. ⁷

At the heart of this carefully crafted cohabitation model was the dina. The latter provided a framework for resources rationalization in the form of the “coordinated management of land and land improvement techniques, systems of grazing reserves, deferment schemes of grazing, and water and fishing development.” ⁸ It is an institution that organized equitable access to collective resources (water and grazing land), a means of integrating neighbors and stranger kin, notably captive populations. Its ethics presumably favored captors’ values and political design, but it nonetheless “brought order and a functional economy to a region prone to drought, limited resources, and conflict over resources.” ⁹ The institution of dina thus served three crucial functions, to do with (1) the organization of production, distribution, and consumption; (2) a frame for the articulation of solidarity, entitlements, and privileges; and (3) a source of ideas of justice and ethics to guide the previously mentioned.

Thus to understand the dina merely as a tribute-making and territorial control system would be to miss its fundamental normative principles. ¹⁰ Organized by a wadi, the dina fostered an idea of sharing, of mutual respect, and its subversion was often offset by recourse to raiding practices. It was in no way the most equitable or the most stable collective system for it was vulnerable to social change. However, it constituted a significant elaboration and an appropriate form that sustained lives and communities before the intrusion of modernization projects under colonial and postcolonial frameworks.

The destruction of the dina inevitably affected the distribution of sociopolitical power through relative disempowerment, compromised the ability of Sahelians to engage in livelihood-enhancing cultural values and practices, and caused impoverishment and destitution. ¹¹ Mass decimation of cattle put a brutal end to transhumance following the unprecedented droughts of the 1970s and 1980s and subsequent ecological disaster and famine. The acute vulnerability of nomadic populations during this period was not lost on Sahelian states and the international community (development and disaster relief) as residents were made dependent on food aid and required to return to their “official” village of residence if they were to receive their ration. Even after the withdrawal of food aid following the return of rain, Fulani herders were forced to sedentarize and adopt agriculture, something many of them find debasing and self-devaluing in addition to being a source of identity confusion. ¹²

In this context, raiding has always been a central regulatory mechanism that establishes a form of dynamic equity whenever asymmetrical power relations endangered the sustainability of life for Sahelian communities. Its primary role is livelihood enhancing; its secondary function is a competition regulation through redistribution of power. Up to the nineteenth century, raids were a cause as much as a means to resolving conflicts between nomadic and sedentary populations. They thus served to maintain political stability in a context of economic precariousness and political competition, but also to stem attempts at direct governance, ordering, control, and exclusion from zones of commerce, exchange, and interactions. Throughout the history of the Sahel, raiding provided a framework for intercommunal confrontations, the means of reproduction for an extractive economy based on the accumulation of people, and the terms of state formation. It therefore regulated access to collective resources while sanctioning practices of social justice. In that sense, razzias were at once foundational to state formation (the Sokoto caliphate being one example) and to the disruption of centralization processes. In fact, the same groups that lent a hand to state builders were equally capable of undermining state authority; the requirement for autonomy often superseded the need to build collaboration.

The razzia was a profitable incursion into an enemy or rival community motivated by a desire to capture horses, camels, goats, goods, and sometimes women. It was based on a principle of reciprocity. The hostile group was justified in marauding perpetrators of razzias. Loss of human lives was less frequent in relatively well-established razzia economies. From a banal point of view then, raiding operated as an invitation to enter in an exchange relationship framed by two requirements: it was to be (1) normal and necessary and (2) equitable—normal depending on mutual understanding of rules, and equitable where provision is made for “retaliation” and reciprocation. In contrast to a total war whereby the aim is to destroy the enemy, precolonial modes of confrontation were premised upon the idea that the survival of the adversary and rival communities was the responsibility of rivals. The razzia equally played a social function as a rite of passage for young men.

The razzia was also meant to initiate an exchange relationship between two or more parties where it did not exist. In that sense, it was never a senseless, irrational model of brutality. Loss of life was in fact rare and excesses of brutality were compensated on the basis of rules agreed upon among groups participating in specific raiding systems. In its contemporary forms, however, raiding operates in a context of unilateralism, the rules are subverted, and possibilities for “retaliation” or reciprocation equally limited.

The advent of jihad altered both the logic and orientation of the razzia model for it made use of the latter in the expansion of Islam in North Africa and the Sahel. The raiding economy was unarguably made more complex; an established system of exchange provided a context and justification for the Islamic idea and practice of the jihad. ¹³ The small community of emigrants that followed Muhammad to Madina in 622 committed to a policy of razzia because of limited agricultural and trading opportunities. Historical accounts of Islam during this period are often descriptions of expeditions ¹⁴ whose justifications point to the persecution of Muslims by Meccans.

Three points are important here. First, the idea of the Islamic jihad has very specific historical conditions; it developed “out of the circumstances in which Muslims found themselves in their Arabian environment.” ¹⁵ For the nascent Muslim community (who were themselves nomads who had engaged in the practice in the past), raids were both a defense against hostility and a form of attack as best defense. Second, Islam was a subversive belief system that emerged in a conservative society; opponents of Muhammad’s community placed the latter in a position in which they had to fight for their survival. Third, the political economy of jihad shows its material bases and the very contingent/conjectural context of its expansion.

The combination of raid/jihad was important in the constitution of the idea of an Islamic federation, as it had previously been to the constitution of clans for alliances. In fact, “it was the almost fortuitous linking of the Islamic religion with the Arab conceptions of razzia and the federation that led to the expansion of the Islamic community.” ¹⁶ The conception of “protected minorities” (ahl adh-dhimma), first Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians, then Buddhists and Hindus, served as much as a technique of management of diversity as the possibility for the levying of a protection tax called jizya. Once Islam had asserted itself in Arabia, military expeditions were sent in the direction of Syria; “these expeditions were essentially large-scale razzias [that] provided an outlet for the excess energy of former nomads, who could not be allowed to attack other members of the federation.” ¹⁷ However, a strictly political–economic reading of raiding in Islam risks reducing the basis for legitimacy to a purely material question. In reality, Islam never had a centralizing power, nor was it meant to. Moreover, there was a powerful imaginary that animated converts and informed their understanding of raids, both defensive and preemptive, as necessary in the preservation of an Islamic state and its expansion. This moral backdrop cannot be underestimated.

Sahelian Berbers joined the political expansion of Islam at first as a way of gaining the right to partake in expeditions for plunder. In Chad, razzia was practiced as much as an expedition of jihad as a social exercise. The newly converted Tuareg were themselves a minority that faced the same imperative of accommodation and integration as many minority others. If Islamic ideology gave justification and legitimacy for raiding, it also provided a framework and guidelines for how religious others should be treated. In fact, Islam injected morality into a historical practice of raid, for once a community was conquered, it had to be treated in a just manner. Muslim leaders were required to create the conditions for social harmony and the redistribution of resources. The point of all this is to say that traditional raiding, whether pre- or post-Islamic, was subject to specific principles. These relate to the prohibition of raiding against allies and members of the same federation, and, more importantly, to the fact that raiding could not take place when “retaliation” or redress was not possible. The requirement for reciprocity was thus inbuilt in the razzia system.

Raiding without Reciprocity: Dissident Violence and Competing Legitimacies

Starting in the 1840s, the French heavily resorted to, and relied on, raids in their Algerian “campaigns.” In fact, they instrumentalized an indigenous tool of political stability in order to reduce the costs of military expansion in the arid and hostile North African environment and to loot for supplies for their troops and for operations of punishment against recalcitrant groups. The French further adopted the razzia as the main method of warfare under Thomas Bugeaud (1840) and subsequent commanders. Elevated to something akin to a doctrine, the practice of raiding was given parliamentarian sanction by Paris up to the time when news of the atrocities committed by French armies reached metropolitan liberal circles. ¹⁸ Raiding methods accounted for the success of French armies following countless setbacks. Both in nineteenth-century Algeria and twentieth-century Morocco, raids were responsible for the subjection of nomadic groups even though colonial successes were always temporary. In both territories, booty was used as barter and leverage in pressurizing Sahelian groups to surrender. In instrumentalizing the preexisting raiding system and in subverting its rules, the French turned a mode of economic and social stability into a “ruthless operational practice,” ¹⁹ in fact, a practice of freedom into an instrument of domination.

Then and now, the logic behind raiding was the same. In the nineteenth century, it was used to conquer and “pacify” and in the twenty-first century to enable the unbridled expansion of capital in a context of economic warfare. Two issues arise out of French distortion of the rules of raiding. First, there was no compensation or provision for reparation. Second, the use of raiding in an asymmetrical war reduced its targets to subhumans who could not be recognized as having a right of reciprocity. It was therefore not surprising that dissidence against colonial presence and the subsequent postcolonial state took on rather violent turns.

In fact, the increasingly destructive forms of violence produced by dissident and subversive groups in the Sahel merely mirrors the extreme violence unleashed by the states themselves, but also their external sponsors particularly in a context of a GWoT. US-trained Malian and Nigerien militaries have been found responsible of grave acts of violence and gross violations of human rights against civilian populations where they were seriously challenged by dissidents Tuareg groups. The Nigerien army in particular—the infamous Forces Armées Nigeriennes (FAN) —is a recidivist in human rights violations. ²⁰ It has been openly accused of genocide. ²¹ However, genocidal practices and war crimes are not the preserve of armies operating in a context of impunity. Multinational corporations (MNCs) have equally been found engaging in acts of violence and violations of human rights. French giant Areva ²² has in many instances been linked to human rights violations through direct support in the form of material resources, intelligence, and technical assistance to both the Nigerien military or the Tuareg rebels depending on the balance of forces. ²³ Thus, the distinction between legal/legitimate and illegal/illegitimate forms of violence becomes almost aberrant. However, in places like the Sahel, MNCs-induced disasters and genocidal practices receive scant to no media attention.

In the twenty-first century, raids have taken predatory forms across the Sahel. On one hand, they have targeted individuals who for various reasons are seen as direct or indirect participants in the political economy of exploitation. The monopolistic exploitation of uranium by Areva is seen as consolidating a lease in perpetuity by a former colonial power over a former colony. In fact, in a configuration whereby small (weak) states are so to speak coopted by powerful MNCs, Areva becomes the quintessential example of a local instantiation of a global drive for privatization and neoliberal permissiveness. Multinationals like Areva define governments’ economic policy frameworks, they finance ruling parties’ electoral campaigns, they maintain their own security apparatus, and they have been complicit in the overthrowing of many an African government.

The point of this discussion is the following. The legitimacy of government by extortion and the legality of economics by extortion both come under question in a legally complex public/private “partnership” such as the Areva/Nigerien government relationship. From a historical point of view, and in parallel to this phenomenon, the self-administration of justice is nothing exceptional: the process of expropriation through abductions and ransoming of Areva employees by dissident groups merely becomes a continuation of preexisting trading and exchange patterns between northern and southern zones. Ransoming and smuggling practices in the Sahel, like piracy off the Atlantic coast in the seventeenth century, emerge out of the distortion or the disruption of normal trading patterns and the stifling of “legitimate” economic activities. ²⁴ In fact, sporadic increases in piracy activities are by and large linked to the overall economic context, particularly to diminishing opportunities and limited outlets for affected communities.

Further, if terrorism in the Sahel was but a fabrication of the GWoT, its enduring rhetoric has acquired an autonomous reality best exemplified by the physical extension of the “Sahelian front,” the latter encompasses “the Atlantic and Indian Oceans…linked by a geographical zone of conflict from Mauritania in the West, across Mali, Niger, Chad, Sudan and Ethiopia to Somalia in the East.” From its epicenter in Mali and Niger, the new terror front has unknown political and military “ramifications for Algeria, Libya, Chad, Mauritania and Nigeria, not to mention the hegemonic interests of France, China and the USA.” ²⁵ One of the unintended consequences of state repression in Mali, Niger, and Algeria has been the constitution of a Tuareg front with alliances between the Le Mouvement des Nigériens pour la justice (MNJ) and their Malian counterpart, the MNLA (National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad) rebellion. In this context, terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism as discrete categories become convenient fictions that allow many forms of political violence against Tuareg militants. Added to this are instances of misinformation deliberately fabricated by Western and Sahelian governments in order to justify repression. ²⁶

Two elements were important here and their practice has historically informed the relationship between the state and those groups that operate outside state boundaries. These are the notion of vital space and the idea of reciprocity. In the Sahel, subversive groups were more susceptible to cooperation with the state when and where the latter did not encroach upon their vital space. During the expansion of the Songhai and Mali empires, nomadic groups availed themselves to the service of imperial expansion. While rejecting all forms of sedentarization, they made it a point to partake in distributive systems in place. This entailed that precolonial empires and postcolonial states made provision for the preservation of their vital space and lifestyle. In return for their service, the state turned a blind eye to the trafficking of drugs, smuggling, and other “illegal” activities. In fact, drug trafficking and smuggling (cigarettes, electronics, medicine, and people) have become the most dominant form of economic activity in the Sahel alongside the abduction industry.

Beyond the issue of the illegal or criminal nature of the traffic of drugs and other prohibited substances, the proliferation of unconventional trades partly results from the exclusion, under local manifestations of the new political economy, of nomadic groups from “legal” channels and frameworks. ²⁷ Drugs and smuggling have thus replaced the trade in gold, salt, hides, and so on; these products have merely become a substitute. From an international law perspective, the nomadic populations turned transnational bandits would be, just like pirates, and in William McNeil’s characterization, macroparasites that dwell on the hard work of others. ²⁸

In international maritime law and in the literature on piracy more generally, the latter is discussed as a form of predation and use of indiscriminate violence in the taking of the property of others. The legalist perspective is predominant and it points to a view of piracy as expropriation. However, both the good actor/bad actor syndrome and references to hard work and property obfuscate the need to interrogate different understandings of property, ownership, and the public good. In the particular case of the Sahel, I propose to look at kidnapping and ransoming as instances of unconventional and disruptive economic practices that constitute expressions of conflicting understandings of rights between expansionist/extractive practices and local economic forms. Against the legalist perspective, raiding finds self-legitimating resources in the very act of disruption of the legitimacy of dominant rights discourse. It does so not through an appeal to a transcendent legalist logic but through a corrective redistribution of power capable of preserving spaces of freedom.

At the Periphery of States: Between Cooperation and Subversion

If the global political economy had begun impinging upon local processes in Sahel since the fifteenth century, its effects were to be intensified through colonial operations in the nineteenth century. Revolts against Western imperialism resulted in the constitution of secessionist groups with strong political grievances. In the nineteenth century, raids were central in the establishment of states (Niger, Chad) as a way of restoring equalities in a context of inequality. During the colonial period, razzias became a means of disruption of colonial administration; they were a great source of concern for the latter. In fact, an attempt to curb raids in the Sahel led to the establishment of military-style indirect administration in Northern Mali. Zealous chiefs were recruited by French colonial authorities to rule on their behalf; they relied predominantly on militia structures to police, repress, and contain dissident populations. In the Adrar region, for instance, the French relied on the Ifoghas, one of the most prominent Tuareg groups and the future leaders of the Tuareg dissidence in Mali (MNLA). As French auxiliaries, the Ifoghas did more than just to police the region; they fiercely combated the perpetrators of raids. At the same time, they managed to buttress their political predominance through greater access to material resources, weapons, and transportation means. Nomadism, and relative marginalization, as lifestyle was a choice for political autonomy or a political response to political oppression.

At any rate, Sahelian populations at the periphery of centers of political power have always come in contact with the state (or what amounts to the state) under conditions of violence and repression. In this context, groups have emerged, that have mirrored state violence at the point of contact with the latter. Not that the state in the Sahel is more repressive than elsewhere. James Scott shows how, in the context of Southeast Asia, groups whose cultural practices and life forms are incompatible with centralized forms of authority have rebelled against state attempts to “develop” and govern them. ²⁹ The state as an institution is inherently repressive in that it tends to abuse its prerogatives over the means of violence. But the recognition of the state’s primacy in the use of violence does not and should not mean that the latter cannot avoid ethical judgment. The history of the Sahel-Saharan desert is in fact a history in which the conditions of subject and state are constantly renegotiated given an absentee state that only manifests itself in violent spurts, and populations that have learned to govern themselves without a centralized authority. ³⁰ Dissident groups could at once enter into alliances with central authorities and fight them. In times of dissidence or war against central governments, razzias were always a source of, and a means to restore social justice and political stability.

In Algeria, for instance, the French relied upon local recruits to carry the physically demanding raids. The horsemen of the goum were notorious for their mastery of a hit-and-run type of raid that left communities “bewildered.” The same recruits were also likely to turn against the French if the terms of collaboration were no longer favorable to them. Nomadic groups have thus always operated with, on the margin of, or outside state structures and jurisdiction. The state was at once a convenient ally and the ultimate enemy. For if the state has a way of deploying its ideological, political, and material resources in its claim of jurisdiction over the territorial confines of the formal state, Tuareg fighters also view themselves as integral owners and guardians of the territories and zones from which they are being excluded. At this point, legitimacy becomes an overriding concern, as well as a resource that permits a recovery of rights through various means.

In effect, throughout the history of state formation in the Sahara and the Sahel, violence was never the monopoly of the state. On the other hand, contrary to common beliefs, razzias were not the exclusive preserve of those that felt excluded or marginalized by central states. However, historically, razzias were never arbitrary, random acts of violence devoid of any rational logic. They were subject to rules of conduct and restitution and these were well understood by groups that participated in the system. But all of this has unarguably disappeared under neoliberal dispensation. Both Areva (as a raiding entity) and Al-Qaeda au Maghreb islamique (AQMI) are involved in the same raiding economy under different rules devoid of reciprocity, long-term social investment, and ultimately humanity. Neither Areva nor AQMI restitute what they expropriate. When the rules of engagement are distorted in this manner, the question of morality is posed in specific ways.

The regulation of razzias has indeed changed: the securitarian drive has become more intense and its logic more pervasive, the state has become more and more repressive, the forces of intervention have become more powerful; interventions are designed to monitor the mobility as much as regiment the lifestyle of nomadic populations. The securitization logic behind the external support of Sahelian states to fight their “terrorists” merely reinforces a need to control territorial boundaries and state capacity to monitor its populations. For in the Sahel as elsewhere, terrorism has become a blanket term used in a deliberately vague and dangerous manner that legitimates the elimination of enemies and adversaries; the related use of security merely reasserts a narrow and antiquated understanding of the state. The new US Global Peace Operations Initiative (GPOI), for instance, funds military and security training and it has a broader goal of “increase[ing] Africa’s counter-terrorism capabilities, prevent the creation of terrorist safe havens and, coincidentally, secure future energy and resources.” ³¹ Under the Trans-Sahara Counter Terrorism Partnership (TSCTP), the US Special Operations Forces (SOF) run joint military exercises with Malian, Nigerien, and other Sahelian armies participating in the program; military training and equipment are also provided, intelligence shared, zones of intervention delineated while groups opposed to their national governments are delegitimatized, labeled “terrorists,” and rendered liable for punishment, repression, torture, and summary murder.

It is therefore not surprising that under such circumstances, raids in the form of abductions and ransoming have become more costly and murderous. However, their violence merely mirrors the violence unleashed by intervening powers in the name of GWoT and produced in equal measure in land-grabbing battles involving MNCs, state-funded ventures from the Middle East, private individuals, and foundations. The overall effects, on the extent of precariousness and the erosion of the capacity of Sahelians to cope with crisis, famine, desertification, and environmental disasters have led to a unique kind of insecurity only experienced by populations, such as the Tuareg and other excluded groups, abandoned by states and left with little resources from preexisting social institutions. In historical and contemporary forms of raiding, elements of continuity and discontinuity are apparent in the techniques employed (military and global positioning system technology, satellite phones, techniques of mapping and mobility, etc.); these modulate in turn rationalizing and legitimating discourses in significant manners. If the political economic argument remains prevalent, the justification of raiding as an imminent response to total militarization also becomes compelling.

To Develop, to Democratize, and to Free, or Three Ways of Operationalizing Uncertainty

In the nineteenth-century Sahel, French colonial authorities introduced new land tenure systems to enable cash crop production, raise household taxes, and sedentarize transhumant populations. Efforts to tie Fulani herders to specific territorial boundaries, in other words to regulate their mobility, govern them, and tax them, were met with tremendous resistance for sedentarization was enforced at the expense of herders and nomadic life. ³² The pursuit of development further placed constraints on territorial use and mobility through the creation of “borders.” Pacification from a French point of view meant crushing resistance, alternate use of cooptation and collaboration, and ultimately a divide-and-rule policy that profoundly strained relations between communities. ³³ The introduction of liberal formulations and models of property disrupted previous arrangements around the utilization of land and scarce resources, and new land tenure systems equally stripped nomadic populations of their rights of access to land particularly during drought periods.

The subsequent disintegration of local systems of solidarity (for instance, the dina) compromised the possibility of reconstituting viable social security nets. Their resilience to uncertainty was severally put to test by the brutal “introduction of extreme instability into their lives and more aberrant forms of uncertainty” ³⁴ which rendered their life-forms even more uncertain and precarious and “for which they can [no longer] plan.” ³⁵ This situation was exacerbated by successive nationalization and privatization of fodder, wells, and land which severely interfered with a complex network or pastoral, grazing, and agricultural routes; the new policies however mostly benefited national elites including the leadership of the Tuareg rebellion who is known to instrumentalize the conflict for rents. ³⁶

Under the colonial system, external intervention was framed as a modernization project best exemplified by the ideology of development. Development became the excuse and the condition under which nomadic populations were forcefully brought into the fold of sedentarized (stabilized) statehood both as objects of its regulatory control and the recipients of its repressive governance. In the 1990s, democratization motivated and defined the contours of intervention although when the Algerian Front Islamique du Salut (FIS) won elections, international support for constitutional transformation eventually turned them into internal enemies to the Algerian state and led to over two decades of bloody rebellion that inevitably internationalized through affiliation with Al-Qaeda.

The Al-Qaeda reference has inexorably prompted all sorts of phantasmagorical accounts about the global expansion of terror in the Sahel. But Al-Qaeda in North West Africa has a very specific origin in political repression, economic marginalization, and the continued debilitation of the social, economic, and cultural resources for individual and collective realization. The Islamist insurgency commanded by the Groupe Salafiste pour la Predication et le Combat/Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC) did not spring out of a desire to spread Sharia law or as a crusade against nonbelievers. A 1992 military coup put an end to Algeria’s first democratic experiment. The Islamist party of FIS was repressed, a state of emergency declared which was to last nineteen years and it justified the temporary suspension of civil law; the reliance of law enforcement strategies over parliamentary and institutional procedures consolidated a security state steeped in secrecy. ³⁷ The GSPC (formerly FIS) was born out of a very geopolitical analysis along the following lines: the global political economy is configured in a way that enables the West to exploit Sahelian resources and amass wealth while giving them unbridled access to Sahelian space and institutions. Western support for the repression of democratically elected Islamist party was very much seen as part of the same logic of holding Sahelian resources, populations, institutions, and spaces under control.

Humanitarian Benevolence and the Political Economy of Violence

In the global drive to enfold extractive enclaves into controllable zones, the twin imperative of productivity and security dictate taming ungoverned populations so that their resources can be safely exploited. Post 9/11, the language of human rights provides the most potent point of entry for new forms of interventionism. These heavily rely on necessary fictions, in particular a myth of institutional vacuum that contends that nomadic Sahelians are backward, belligerent, primitive, and irrational populations with no prior experience of organized social structures. In fact, security experts would have us believe that we live in an increasingly insecure, uncertain, and fragile world as long as autonomous groups are not subjected to formal government. As Mark Duffield and others have remarked, the insecurity in question is partially artificial and it is forged by the requirements of new forms of interventionism in need of humanitarian justification. ³⁸ In our political cartography, we do not conceive of the Sahel as having real structural problems other than the violence of terrorism and the devastation of episodic famines. Nor are we capable of conceiving of Sahelians as particularly attached to their land and resources. In these cartographies, AQMI and MNLA fighters may appear as pillaging bands that spread terror in the Sahel. In reality, there are giving signals that we are yet to understand properly. In fact, we have neither the proper lenses nor the appropriate methodology to understand these signals.

These signals are directed both at the state and a generic/vague “international community” for behind the Malian or the Nigerien states are Areva and the military forces of France and the United States. What is therefore missing in our analytical contraption is a capacity to scrutinize their arguments from an internal logic, possibly from their viewpoint. Yet the structure and the logic of dissidence from Sahelian nonstate actors mirror another key element that is missing in our analysis; that is the extent of the disarticulation of familiar life forms under global dispensation. There are two aspects to this. First, neoliberalism has fundamentally reformed the (action of) state while reconstituting liberalism itself. Second, and as a consequence, a problem of justice is posed in the widening divergence of the actions and motivations of political versus economic actors. The end of the social, provident state—before it was even fully deployed—has had drastic consequences for the possibility of a state that is not just repressive but attends to the needs of local populations. The role of the state has in effect been reduced to that of an apparatus of management of contingencies and crises.

In this context, the GWoT is an overarching campaign that rests on, and feeds into an unnuanced villains/good guys rhetoric that obfuscates the problematic nature of state violence, widespread misinformation, and the extent to which states and MNCs are willing to go in order to lay their hands on strategic resources. The GWoT rhetoric permeates the “transformational diplomacy” turn in US Foreign Policy ³⁹ that subsumes development aid in the war on terror. This is most apparent in the partial merger between the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the US State Department while the Army, the Marines, and the Navy have also become aid providers. In this new configuration, the Sahel has become, following Afghanistan and Pakistan, America’s most important laboratory to test how the fight against terror could provide a framework for just about every form of diplomatic, political, economic, and military engagement with Sahelian states.

Inaugurated by the Pan-Sahelian Initiative (PSI), this experiment was expanded in scale and content to include nine Sahelian countries under a TSCTP that maintains Special Forces operatives on standby in the region. Support provided include the training of local militaries in antiterrorist combat, the provision of military equipment, and security sector reform (SSR), the strengthening of law enforcement infrastructure, and so on, a frame broad enough to justify direct military interventions. For many, “transformational diplomacy” is nothing but a further stage in the “long war” ⁴⁰ in expanding the remit of USAID to include reform in the security sector, thus making it a quasi-security agency. ⁴¹

The transformation of USAID into a civilian branch of the militarization and securitization of American diplomacy in the Sahel and elsewhere in Africa is particularly problematic. In the past decade, development practice has moved from an idea of improving the economic and social conditions (developing) of people to regulating their movement and mobility (security governance). On one hand, the GWoT inflected a decidedly “philanthropic” turn to liberal humanitarianism; it further created analytical confusion between the normative values of democracy, good governance, and transparency and the repressive measures promoted under its wake. On another, the problem with the total security and total war thinking behind the GWoT is that it creates an artificial world in which the promotion of an all-securitarian posture is such that the actions of the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization are not so dissimilar from those of “terrorists.” Having said this however, I want to stress that the mimetic dynamic between dissident groups and states is limited to the extra-legal character of their activity: from the perspective of Walter Benjamin’s “critique of violence,” both states and dissident groups equally operate in a liminal zone of legality even as the actions of both are endowed with a potential of legitimacy. ⁴²

In any case, it is not surprising that development aid has now come to be seen by local populations to be as pernicious as military support. Aid has gone from an intrusive practice that partly seeks to regiment local life in an attempt to “stabilize” it to a means of consolidating the repressive capacity of the state. The securitization of aid further alienates local populations in reinforcing the coercive nature of governance. This development/security nexus in fact undermines the normative values of liberal democracy and freedom in the name of which policies are implemented; it further breeds extremism, anti-American sentiment as well as resistance against the state.

Now, the politicization of development aid in the pursuit of US national security and geostrategic interests is arguably nothing new. PSI’s predecessor, the International Criminal Investigative Training Assistance Program (ICITAP), which ran programs in Liberia, Rwanda, Somalia, and South Africa, either partially funded or worked closely with USAID. ⁴³ ICITAP was preceded by the Office of Public Safety (OPS) set up by President Kennedy in 1962. OPS was an ideological project disguised in the language of “institutional building” and “capacity-building” for civilian police through “training, technical assistance and equipment.” In reality, the OPS was to be involved in illegal activities involving the training of paramilitary forces in Central America, and the provision of equipment used in torture and repression in a drive to build covert intelligence networks under a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director. Although the project was housed in USAID, its activities were deployed in tandem with CIA personnel. Knowledge about OPS caused a big enough uproar for the program to be shut down in 1974 by Congress. ⁴⁴ Police assistance was subsequently banned under Section 660 of the Foreign Assistance Act. The point of all this is to stress the deeply problematic, flawed, and counterproductive nature of US engagement in the Sahel, given historical precedents elsewhere. This engagement is primarily driven by a desire to “capacitate” African governments to fight a terrorism partially created by a threat-driven foreign policy and secondly by a desire to protect US national interests at all costs.

A second example I want to explore is an apparently benign enterprise that has also sought to bring “development” in the Sahel through greater “international exposure.” There is a common argument that violence lowers the value proposition of the region in terms of touristic attraction, but the apparent innocuousness of the tourism industry has partially obfuscated its intrusive effects on the lives of Sahelians. The notion that tourism will bring economic development and needed global exposure becomes a justification for how Sahelians can be regulated, governed, ordered, and modernized for their own good. The Paris-Dakar Rally is a good example of how the pursuit of recreational sport and other categories of fun and entertainment is part of “softer” forms of interventionism that have had their toll on Sahelian lives and normative outlook. The Dakar Rally is the biggest off-the-road rally in the world. It has been organized since 1979. Its original route included Paris at a departure point and Dakar as an arrival point but the itinerary has changed over the years.

The rally raid has however been responsible for stunting plant growth, the destruction of livestock on its coarse soil, erosion, and eventually desertification among other impacts. The rally has also claimed many deaths among its participants; many spectators, particularly children, have also been victims of vehicles going off track or overspeeding through small villages.

From the viewpoint of its organizers, the rally was meant to bring economic development in the form of roads, foreign currencies, more touristic opportunities (an argument that has never been properly tested), greater international “exposure” for the region, and eventually better integration into “global circuits.” But many observers had different ideas. Even the Vatican invited itself in the debate in characterizing the sporting event as a “vulgar display of power and wealth in places where men continue to die from hunger and thirst.” ⁴⁵ Frustrations and anger caused by controversies around the rally came to a head in 2008. Accusations came out from everywhere, with activist groups such as CAVAD (Group for the Dakar rally raid anonymous victims) calling for legal measures against the physical, social, and cultural disruptions caused by the race. For CAVAD in particular, the rally uses North West Africa as a playground for westerners racing through the “wilderness” with their sophisticated vehicles at the expense of populations whose concerns are far removed from such trivialities. This is of course a common theme in the critique of European modernity and its tendency to construct and primitivize cultural others for the enjoyment of Europe.

In addition to the plundering of energy resources, the ecological destruction, and many deaths, there is the symbolic dimension in both the cultural alienation that is produced in this presumably positive “international exposure” and the requirements placed on local populations and governments (required to deploy their security forces to protect race participants) that they adapt (and not the other way around) and that they mobilize their energies in favor of this unique civilizational encounter. It is clear that the main winners in all this are the corporate logos that sponsor the different cars, trucks, and motorcycles. In 2008, following threats of violence by dissident groups in the Sahel, the rally was moved to Latin America. On Christmas Eve of the previous year, a French family of four on holiday had been killed in Mauritania. The group that claimed responsibility referred to the imperial nature of the race, calling the Mauritanian government, which supported the race, a collaborator of “crusaders, apostates, and infidels.”

So the rally is a physical and symbolic raid that triggers reactive raids (kidnappings). The extent of the brutal intrusion of a capitalist entertainment industry and the ritualized violence of (interventions) is lost in discussions about the economic worth/weigh of the event. The violence that is unleashed yet controlled in this dangerous sports event is a requirement of acquiescence and acceptation on populations whose lifestyles, modes of production, and reproduction may not be in accord with the “modernization” project benevolently designed for them. The economic justification is hardly different from the pacification discourse that provided an alibi to the imperial campaigns. This is problematic on many levels.

Human Rights and the (Il)legitimacies of Violence

In the past decade, different groups have been involved in hostage taking and ransoming practices in the Sahel. Hostages are never a primary target of hostage takers; they are merely a means to an end, at least if we are to take at face value the pronouncements of hostage-taking groups. Their target is less westerners than western powers, particularly France and the United States for their “crimes” against Sahelian populations and in retaliation for their active involvement in the Sahel. Their justification for kidnapping and the use of violence is couched in terms of justice and its restoration. The violence of kidnapping and the consequent payment of ransom money would thus constitute compensatory taxation levied on state and corporate crimes. If the use of “taxation” is often rejected, references to ransom taking as “tribute,” as “unrequited, systematic exactions effected by force or threat of force,” ⁴⁶ nonetheless prompt questions about the nature of harm that warrants such exactions.

Equally, the distinction of different expressions of piracy in the context of maritime banditry: parasitic (contingent upon volumes of seaborne trace and economic resources of targeted littoral populations), episodic (occasioned by sudden disruptions in the normal trading circuits), or intrinsic (as an inbuilt taxation strategy in the trading patterns of particular societies) ⁴⁷ may provide insights on its probable causes but falls short of providing a satisfactory explanatory framework insofar as its purposes are concerned. Sahelian combatants, for instance, include in their appraisal of western criminals every westerner as a direct or indirect beneficiary of their governments’ crimes. In the same manner in which Somali pirates denounce “corporate maritime terrorism” ⁴⁸ as the chief cause of their resort to piracy, Sahelian groups point to the harms of corporate “extractive terrorism” perpetrated by western companies, and the “terrorism” of France and the United States, in collusion with Sahelian governments. In this social justice framework, the redistribution is as much as about a redistribution of harm than it is about the transfer of ransom monies as war spoils.

The logic behind this framework may seem rather simplistic, but it warrants more scrutiny and attention than has so far been accorded to the claims of “terrorists” roaming in the Sahel. In fact, their claims have little legibility in the framework of rights as traditionally understood in liberal humanitarianist tradition. Attempts to understand the worldview of Sahelian militants are easily evacuated as mysterious and impenetrable and thus resistant to all forms of intellectual inquiry. Kidnapping and other acts of violence frequently resorted to by AQMI belong to a register of practice that is associated with a war context/condition. AQMI itself understands its endeavor in the Sahel as a commitment in an open war that pits them against “the enemies of Islam.” In this fuzzy war, both the objects and the agents of violence constantly shift locations.

A difficulty arises here in the sense that a definition of “enemy” that is extended to every beneficiary of the “unjust” war under question risks making every “Western citizen” liable for violence on behalf of western governments and corporations. Through this logic, AQMI and other Sahelian combatant groups have created for themselves a new moral principle in the just war framework, that is the right to correct injustice through unjust acts. Kidnapping as practiced by AQMI specifically targets western citizens (those at least whose governments do pay ransoms) as indirect participants in an extractive system (an economic war) in which they would be the silent or tolerant supporters and patrons of governments and corporations engaged in acts of economic crime.

According to this logic, western citizens are part of the extractive scheme of the property rights of those whose natural resources are being plundered. Some even go further in contending that economic crimes are committed by western governments and corporations in order to preserve a certain lifestyle. In this extractive economy, neoliberal capitalism not only promotes the appropriation of the property of Sahelian, it also reworks their subjectivities, their rights, their needs, under the guise of humanitarianism. This is a perspective heavily guided by a view of human rights geared toward the protection of property. Such understanding of rights has little to do with the reality and the basic condition of Sahelians for it disrupts their survival strategies.

In their justificatory claims, both AQMI and MNLA militants develop a framework that taps into the ethical and the theological registers; they equally dabble in the register of buccaneer language. In AQMI’s internal theology, hostages are treated like “war prisoners” (asra el harb); their liberation is therefore subject to conditions that are informed by Islamic law in war. From their own logic (that of an irregular just war order), AQMI militants would be recognized a status of nonstate actors that (1) exercise a right of responsibility and (2) seek a restoration of order according to their understanding of it.

One major snag in this framework is the difficulty of recognizing a homogeneous course of action, or common disposition of actors involved. However, fragmentation works for AQMI in that no institutional unity is needed to carry out their subversive project. The qatiba merely organizes the logistics of plunder and redistribution of war proceeds. In the Just War literature, the claim to a just cause “entails the right to self-defense, preemption, defense of a friendly nation, or the prevention of a humanitarian disaster.” These criteria have undergone an alteration in view of the changing nature of wars, its actors, and the stakes involved. Thus, the criteria of a just cause are different for irregular nonstate actors for they may encompass “exploitation, subjugation or attempted annihilation” ⁴⁹ as many forms of aggression that would justify retaliation and insurgent action—recognized in international law.

In the increasing military training programs and support provided by America to Sahelian states, in the avowedly securitarian approach to conflict resolution in Northern Mali by the Malian government and numerous strategies meant to secure control over natural resources, many Sahelians see patterns of the restoration of a past imperial order. Sahelian states were prompt to embrace American antiterrorist programs in the Sahel either by perceived necessity to contain the terror threat or by felt necessity to support policy requests from an important ally. The Sahel-Saharan region is a region rich in natural resources, most of which are awaiting effective exploitation. The attribution of exploitation rights and licenses to foreign firms remains a prerogative that Sahelian governments use however without consultation with their populations on how they might benefit from these.

Legitimation is articulated in both a positive and a negative sense. AQMI militants contest the logic of those who are combating through American, European, and African governments, which are also seen as carrying the will of western powers on the ground. Their legitimacy would be derived from their commitment to restoring the means of mobility and security disrupted by state and external intrusion. Azawad in fact means “land of transhumance”; political claims over its creation are therefore an attempt to restore fluid zones of mobility and circulation in the Sahel/Sahara. Their claim casts a negative light on a restrictive just war theory. The distributive justice argument is a prescriptive model that justifies restorative violence upon perpetrators of injustice. It is not surprising that such an understanding of rights should emerge in opposition to a human rights regime that is seen to support the increasing expansionism of neoliberal capital. For this human rights regime is geared toward the protection of those rights understood by Marx as “rights of property owner, enforcing law of his interest, law of wealth, under the mask of equal rights for all.”

However, to read raiding as unequivocally a form of political resistance against relative deprivation and stifling governance in a context of overdetermining forces of global capitalism risks papering over the structural dynamics that enfold forms of resistance to capitalism into capitalist logics. Specifically, the political economy of raiding is closely fashioned by the variations of the extractive industry on one hand, and militarist capitalism on the other, so much so that seemingly autonomous features of raiding-as-resistance have in fact undergone a process of rewriting and recoding by dominant capitalist trends.

Human Rights and Corporate Reason

In 2002, in the case of Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum, Esther Kiobel evoked the US Alien Tort Statute (ATS) which has been in the books for the past 200 years. However, the US Supreme Court decided on June 2013 (1) that the victims of the gross human rights violations alleged in this case were not entitled to relief under the ATS and that (2) more broadly that the ATS does not apply to human rights violations committed in other countries. The law is one of the rare instruments that could have allowed holding serious human rights violators, including businesses, accountable. The African Charter on Human and Peoples Rights is another instrument that has similar ambitions especially in its desire to try economic crimes linked to the illegal and harmful exploitation of natural resources, but it remains an idea that is yet to be properly operationalized.

The decision not only further undermines an American human rights record already heavily marred by egregious practices ranging from torture, illegal detention in the context of the GWoT, but it also severely compromises the capacity for states and individuals to hold private companies responsible for violation of human rights. ⁵⁰ The US Supreme Court decision further entrenches a propensity for discrimination, asymmetrical legal adjudication, and a refusal to recognize a right of reciprocity for non-US citizens. In fact, the ATS has historically been used in bringing gross human rights violators accountable to their American victims in American courts, regardless of the place where the violations take place.

The presumption against extraterritoriality bears down on the understanding and the future of international human rights law in two important ways. First, the aspiration for universality, crucial in the elaboration and the development of international law, implies that perpetrators might be able to escape national jurisdictions but that they can be brought to book by third parties. Second, recently in humanitarian law, there is consensus on the idea that the cloak of sovereignty should not come in the way of remedy, compensation, and accountability with regard to human rights violations particularly where states are themselves violators or complicit in acts of violation. Both provisions were however called into question in the recent ruling. What has become increasingly clear, in this instance, and in the heated debates that surrounded the British Petroleum spillover case in which reparations were granted with alacrity, is that the politicization of international law on one hand, the interference of the judiciary with foreign policy and in the protection of capital impede the possibility for victims’ access to just justice while again demonstrating that its current formulations of juridical personhood are antiquated for corporations’ economic, political, and even military activities often produce greater influence on, and often have far-reaching repercussions for the lives of countless communities.

Yet, customary human rights cannot be used to hold them to account because they are not juridical entities. This was precisely the line of defense adopted by Royal Dutch Petroleum against Kiobel. Shell’s lawyers argued first that customary international law itself provides the provisions by which it can be assessed whether conduct violates the law of nations where non-state actors are alleged to have committed the wrong in question. Second, they contended that no norm has ever existed between nations which can be invoked to impose liability upon corporate actors.

This is not the place to elaborate on the many implications of the Kiobel ruling, but it is important to note the contradictions around the territoriality argument for instance with regard to high sea piracy and crimes committed outside US soil against either American nationals or interests. ⁵¹ Crucially for my argument, the lack of legal accountability of MNCs, particularly in extractive zones such as the Niger Delta, ⁵² and the Sahel, encourages the proliferation of MNCs that behave not unlike chartered companies under colonial and imperial reasons. ⁵³ Another contradiction arises from the fact that MNCs can and do seek legal settlement of investment disputes against states for instance before the International Centre on the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), whereas the latter are essentially unable to hold them accountable over environmental pollution and damage and human rights violations. In all this, the very status of violence itself has changed; it has become both an eminent mode of interaction and a fully fledged idiom of its own that takes the cloak of human rights and conventionalized economic practices. The production of this form of violence is made possible by a juridico-economic system that differentiates ownership of resources from access to, and rights over resources; this process is underlaid by a teleological order/government. Ultimately, the structural inequalities between transnational corporations and local communities are lost in the legal arguments.

Conclusion

The examination of different forms of raiding in colonial strategies of conquest, in the corporate world, in contemporary forms of resource extraction, and in the ransoming industry in the Sahel is not meant to establish a parallel between the violence of “formal actors” versus that of dissident, nonstate actors. Nor is it meant to justify “compensatory” violence. However, in many contexts, the functions of raiding straddle over the restorative and the redistributive in a way that constitutes its ethical backbone. Motivation is arguably an epistemological question which is difficult to disentangle from the particular ways in which the violence of exclusion, repression, or exploitation is experienced by specific populations. Sahelian groups’ justification for resorting to retaliative measures against their states and western interests has to do with the disappearing of their vital space, and the weaning of their capacity to assume a dignified life under severe conditions of scarcity. The subversion of traditional means of sustenance and production, the oppressive policing of northern areas considered by the central government as an outlying zone only good for exploitation and containment, the intrusive nature of external interventionism and subsequent encroachment on indigenous modes of governance, the environmental damage, and destruction of livelihoods, all amount to different forms of aggression.

The various responses to these forms of aggression seem to indicate that the ethics of restorative violence should extend to instances of economic crimes; the relationship that ensues between the moral right of justice and the obligation of justice remains nonetheless unresolved. The questions that should concern any serious critique of the current model would need to be “what is security?” and “who is security for?” For what is disappearing, for ordinary Sahelians caught up in the multilayered violence of the state, of internal and external actors, is a space of life, a vital space, in the pursuit of subjectivities, rights, and values.

What this article has attempted to show therefore is that for those excluded from national sociopolitical arrangements and from the global compact, the meaning of rights and the understanding of the means of restoration of broken mechanisms of self-constitution and self-governance are a far cry from the language, and the practice of rights under the liberal rights regime.