On June 24, 2026, traffic resumed on the strategic axis linking Bamako to Mourdiah and Nara in central-western Mali, after weeks of blockade imposed by JNIM (Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin). More than the reopening itself, the way it happened is telling. The return to circulation was not secured by a decisive military operation from the state. Instead, it came after mediations conducted by local notables and community actors with the jihadist group.
This single episode prompts a reconsideration of how conflict in the Sahel is understood. It suggests that the dynamics of the conflict are no longer limited to a succession of offensives, retreats, or territorial conquests. It also plays out in the ability to open or close a road axis, ensure the continuity of exchanges, influence mobility, or condition the ordinary functioning of collective life. In other words, the center of gravity of the competition seems to be shifting. The question may no longer be who controls a territory, but rather who concretely exercises the functions that allow a society to operate, and thereby produces authority. Based on this hypothesis, I propose to revisit the recent developments in JNIM’s strategy and, more broadly, the transformations of war and the making of authority in the margins of the Sahel.
I. From territorial conquest to the conquest of functions
What is changing in the Sahel today is not only the geography of war; it is its object. The competition appears to focus less on the durable conquest of territories and increasingly on controlling the functions that allow a society to operate. This shift is far from trivial. It invites us to move our gaze: from spaces to flows, from territories to functions, from military conquest to the production of order.
Developments observed in Mali since 2024 illustrate this transformation. Without abandoning attacks on armed forces, JNIM has gradually integrated into its repertoire road blockades, movement restrictions, supply interdictions, control of trade corridors, and pressures on the main axes linking Bamako to Kayes, Nioro-du-Sahel, Ségou, and Mourdiah. These operations produce effects that go far beyond the military dimension. They affect supply chains, market functioning, mobility of people, economic activities, and the ordinary conditions of collective life.
This evolution reflects a strategic change. For a long time, the war in the Sahel was understood through a cartography of controlled territories, conquered localities, or lost and regained military positions. This reading remains relevant, but it becomes insufficient to understand the current transformations of the conflict. JNIM is now pushing further a logic found in several contemporary forms of insurgency: control of functions is gradually becoming as important as control of spaces.
A state exists not only because it exercises sovereignty over a territory. It also exists because it fulfills a set of functions that populations consider essential: securing movement, guaranteeing the continuity of exchanges, protecting supply circuits, dispensing justice, arbitrating conflicts, organizing taxation, and enforcing common rules. When these functions themselves become the main object of competition, the nature of the conflict transforms. The question is no longer just who controls a territory, but who is able to ensure its functioning.
It is precisely on this terrain that JNIM seems to move the confrontation. The movement does not necessarily seek to directly administer the territories where it is established. It appears instead to invest in the functions that make the state socially indispensable, while leaving the latter 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 complete territorial sovereignty than to appropriate the functions that, in the eyes of populations, ground the concrete utility of the state. Roads are perhaps the most visible expression of this transformation. They cease to be mere transport infrastructure and become true 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 cross that space.
This shift from control of territories to control of flows is, in my view, one of the most significant strategic mutations of the war in the Sahel. The real question may no longer be who occupies territories, but who controls the functions that give meaning to those territories. Because when functions change hands before territories, the very nature of the conflict transforms.
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 adherence to JNIM’s political project. It mainly reflects the constraints faced by populations whose survival depends on the reopening of roads, access to markets, and the continuity of exchanges. In these circumstances, negotiation is less a political preference than a survival rationality. However, it would be wrong to consider these communities as a homogeneous block. Traders, transporters, customary chiefs, religious authorities, herders, and rural youth do not share the same interests or relationships with armed groups. These very divergences make communities permanent spaces of negotiation, compromise, but 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 organization capable of institutionalizing authority through a rational-legal order. Its legitimacy rests on the impersonality of rules, bureaucracy, and the monopoly of legitimate physical violence. However, Weberian analysis also reminds that all domination is inscribed in a plurality of registers of legitimacy, where rational-legal, traditional, and charismatic forms can coexist, compete, or mutually reinforce each other.
The Sahelian spaces precisely illustrate this interweaving. State authority constantly interacts with traditional legitimacies embodied by customary chiefs, religious authorities, and local notables, but also with a legitimacy that JNIM seeks to build progressively. This does not rest primarily on the personal charisma of its leaders. It proceeds more from its capacity to produce a concrete order, quickly arbitrate disputes, secure certain circulation axes, regulate markets, or sanction behaviors it considers deviant. This is not, strictly speaking, charismatic authority in Weber’s sense. JNIM rather tends to build what could be called performative legitimacy: a legitimacy that stems neither from institutional status, nor from traditional heritage, nor exclusively from the prestige of a leader, but from the repeated demonstration of its ability to exercise certain functions that populations usually associate with the state. The lifting of the Mourdiah and Nara blockade thus illustrates a configuration in which these different forms of authority do not substitute for one another; they coexist, compete, and sometimes articulate. The state retains its institutional legality; traditional authorities mobilize their social capital to preserve local balances; while JNIM seeks to convert its coercive capacity into governance capacity.
I will go further. What JNIM seems to be pursuing is not so much the immediate conquest of the state apparatus as its progressive functional disempowerment, especially in territorial margins where state presence remains intermittent. By investing in the concrete functions that structure the daily life of populations – securing movement, arbitrating conflicts, regulating exchanges, or organizing access to resources – it does not replace the state; it progressively displaces its center of gravity. The challenge is no longer to occupy the institutions of central power, but to transfer, in the peripheries, the functions that ground political authority. The state remains legally sovereign, but it risks losing what constitutes, in the Weberian sense, the core of its practical legitimacy: the recognized capacity to durably produce collective order where people live. Before contesting the monopoly on legitimate violence, JNIM seems primarily to seek a socially recognized 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 gradually reconfigures the social conditions for producing authority. State-making does not proceed only from constitutions, institutions, or coercive capacities; it also results from the daily recognition of the one who guarantees security, organizes exchanges, arbitrates conflicts, and makes collective life predictable. Every successful mediation, every reopened road, every 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, dispense justice, guarantee mobility, and produce a predictable order. The decisive battle underway in the Sahel today 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 sustainably organizing collective life. In other words, the conflict is less about the monopoly on violence than about the socially recognized capacity to produce authority.
