On 24 June 2026, traffic resumed on the strategic axis linking Bamako to Mourdiah and Nara in central-western Mali, ending a weeks-long blockade imposed by JNIM (Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin). More than the reopening itself, the way it happened deserves scrutiny. Available details indicate that the return of circulation was not the result of a decisive military action by the state, but rather came after mediations by local notables and community actors with the jihadist group.
This episode alone forces a rethink of how we understand conflict in the Sahel. It suggests that conflict dynamics are no longer just about offensives, retreats, or territorial gains. They also play out in the ability to open or close a road, guarantee trade continuity, influence mobility, or condition everyday collective life. In other words, the competition’s centre of gravity is shifting. The question may no longer be who controls a territory, but who actually carries out the functions that let a society operate and thereby produces authority. Based on this hypothesis, I propose to reinterpret JNIM’s recent strategic evolution and, more broadly, the transformations of war and the making of authority in the Sahelian margins.
I. From territorial conquest to functional conquest
What is changing today in the Sahel is not just the geography of war; it is its object. Competition seems increasingly less about lasting territorial control and more about controlling the functions that allow a society to function. This shift is far from trivial. It invites us to move our focus from spaces to flows, from territories to functions, from military conquest to the production of order.
Developments observed in Mali since 2024 illustrate this mutation. Without giving up attacks on armed forces, JNIM has gradually added road blockades, movement restrictions, supply bans, controls on trade axes, and pressure on major corridors linking Bamako to Kayes, Nioro-du-Sahel, Ségou, and Mourdiah. These operations produce effects far beyond the military. They affect supply chains, market functioning, people’s mobility, economic activities, and the ordinary conditions of collective life.
This evolution reflects a strategic change. For a long time, war in the Sahel was understood through a map of controlled territories, captured localities, or lost and recaptured military positions. That reading remains relevant, but it is insufficient to grasp current conflict transformations. JNIM is now pushing further a logic seen in several contemporary insurgencies: controlling functions gradually becomes as important as controlling spaces.
A state exists not only because it exercises sovereignty over a territory. It also exists because it fulfils a set of functions that populations consider essential: securing travel, ensuring trade continuity, protecting supply chains, delivering justice, arbitrating disputes, organising taxation, and enforcing common rules. When these functions themselves become the main object of competition, the nature of conflict changes. The question is no longer just who controls a territory, but who can ensure its operation.
It is precisely on this ground that JNIM seems to be shifting the confrontation. The group does not necessarily seek to directly administer the territories where it is present. Instead, it appears to invest in the functions that make the state socially indispensable, while leaving the state the costs of daily administration. I call this process a functional capture of the state: a strategy by which an armed actor seeks less to exercise full territorial sovereignty than to appropriate the functions that, in the eyes of populations, underpin the state’s concrete utility. Roads are perhaps the most visible expression of this transformation. They cease to be mere transport infrastructure and become political institutions. Closing them, reopening them, filtering goods, taxing trade flows, or conditioning people’s mobility amounts to exercising prerogatives traditionally associated with public authority. In this perspective, controlling a road is no longer just about controlling a space; it is about controlling the economic and social interactions that traverse that space.
This shift from controlling territories to controlling flows is, in my view, one of the most significant strategic mutations in the Sahel war. The real question may no longer be who occupies territories, but who controls the functions that give these territories meaning. Because when functions change hands before territories, the very nature of the conflict changes.
II. When the state ceases to be the sole producer of authority
This transformation also sheds light on the role of communities. Their intervention in lifting the blockade does not necessarily mean support for JNIM’s political project. Rather, it reflects the constraints faced by populations whose survival depends on reopening roads, access to markets, and trade continuity. In these circumstances, negotiation is less a political preference than a survival rationality. However, it would be wrong to see these communities as a homogeneous bloc. Traders, transporters, customary chiefs, religious authorities, herders, and rural youth do not share the same interests or relationships with armed groups. It is precisely these divergences that make communities permanent spaces of negotiation, compromise, and also tensions around the production of local order.
This reality also invites a rethinking of state-making. Since Max Weber, the modern state is conceived as a form of political organisation capable of institutionalising authority through a rational-legal order. Its legitimacy rests on the impersonality of rules, bureaucracy, and the monopoly of legitimate physical violence. Yet Weberian analysis also reminds us that all domination is embedded in a plurality of legitimacy registers, where rational-legal, traditional, and charismatic forms can coexist, compete, or reinforce each other.
Sahelian spaces precisely illustrate this interweaving. State authority constantly interacts with traditional legitimacies embodied by customary chiefs, religious authorities, and local notables, as well as with a legitimacy that JNIM is gradually building. The latter does not rest primarily on the personal charisma of its leaders. It stems more from its ability to produce concrete order, to arbitrate disputes quickly, to secure certain transport axes, to regulate markets, or to sanction behaviour it deems deviant. This is not, strictly speaking, a charismatic authority in Weber’s sense. JNIM instead tends to build what could be called performative legitimacy: a legitimacy that comes neither from institutional status, nor traditional heritage, nor solely from a leader’s prestige, but from the repeated demonstration of its capacity to exercise certain functions that populations usually associate with the state. The lifting of the Mourdiah and Nara blockade thus illustrates a configuration where these different forms of authority do not replace each other; they coexist, compete, and sometimes articulate. The state retains its institutional legality; traditional authorities use their social capital to preserve local balances; while JNIM seeks to convert its coercive capacity into governing capacity.
I would go even further. What JNIM seems to seek is not so much the immediate conquest of the state apparatus as its progressive functional dispossession, especially in territorial margins where the state’s presence remains intermittent. By investing in the concrete functions that structure people’s daily lives – securing travel, arbitrating conflicts, regulating exchanges, or organising access to resources – it does not replace the state; it gradually shifts its centre of gravity. The stake is no longer to occupy the institutions of central power, but to transfer, in the peripheries, the functions that underpin political authority. The state remains legally sovereign, but it risks losing what, in the Weberian sense, is the heart of its practical legitimacy: the recognised capacity to durably produce collective order where populations live. Before contesting the monopoly of legitimate violence, JNIM seems above all to seek a socially recognised capacity to produce authority in spaces where the state has become intermittent.
Conclusion
In this sense, the real issue may no longer be whether JNIM can build a parallel state, but whether it is gradually reconfiguring the social conditions of authority production. State-making does not come only from constitutions, institutions, or coercive capacities; it also results from the daily recognition of whoever guarantees security, organises exchanges, arbitrates conflicts, and makes collective life predictable. Each successful mediation, each reopened road, each dispute settled outside public institutions contributes, even unintentionally, to shifting the boundaries of political legitimacy.
From this perspective, the main challenge for Sahelian states is probably not only the military reconquest of territories. It consists above all in becoming, in the eyes of populations, the most credible actor to ensure security, deliver justice, guarantee mobility, and produce a predictable order. The decisive battle playing out today in the Sahel may not first pit two forces seeking to control a territory. It pits two competing claims to become, in the eyes of populations, the actor capable of durably organising collective life. In other words, the conflict is less about the monopoly of violence than about the socially recognised capacity to produce authority.
Dr Mamadou Akila Bodian
Laboratoire des Études Sociales (LABES)
Institut fondamental d’Afrique noire (IFAN-UCAD)
