Crime, Coping, and Resistance in the Mali-Sahel Periphery

The Mali-Sahel periphery is not an “ungoverned space” captured and preyed on by the transnational forces of global “crime-terrorism” nexuses but an area of overlapping and competing networks of informal governance. Some have an agenda of resistance, others are more aligned with coping and criminality. What they share is that they are neither entirely state nor nonstate but somewhere in between. Different competing “big men” vie for the role of nodal points in different networks of informal governance: some mainly profit-driven, others combining income-generating strategies with social and political objectives, and yet others simply aiming to cope (and hopefully thrive in the future).