Sovereigntism and the emerging politics of eternity in Mali

This paper examines the political imaginaries underpinning Mali’s dramatic rejection of liberalism in the wake of Mali’s most recent military coups in August 2020 and May 2021. Mali’s post-democratic leaders have skilfully employed these imaginaries to gain public support and shore up their power against real and perceived threats at home and abroad. Applying Timothy Snyder’s concept of ‘the politics of eternity’, the paper examines the discourse of key Malian intellectual and political figures to expose some of the foundations on which postcolonial Mali’s imaginaries are based. The current groundswell of sovereigntist discourse in Mali, it argues, is best understood with reference to these constructions and to the historical conditions of Mali’s achievement of independence in the 1960s. While maintaining a critical stance toward this discourse, this paper contends that examining Mali’s politics of eternity provides useful tools for interrogating common liberal and internationalist assumptions about the country’s ongoing crisis.