The return of the local: dialogues with jihadist groups as governance in the Sahelian security order

This article examines how dialogue with jihadist groups in Mali and Niger operates as both a mechanism of governance and a site of ideological translation. It explores how competing Islamic repertoires, reformist-Salafi and Sufi-Maliki, are localised, resisted or refracted through Sahelian religious and socio-political orders. Drawing on ethnographic research, it introduces transactional governance to capture how insurgencies impose, then bargain over, zakāt, sharīʿa-based justice and moral policing to embed authority within local Islamic ecologies. Coercion underwrites them: communities contest the severity of extraction, and non-payment itself justifies violence, so conquest and administration proceed together. In Mali, jihadist rule emerges through the pragmatic localisation of classical Islamic categories; in Niger, the state reintegrates ‘redeemable’ nationals while framing more radical groups as globally alien. Engaging localisation theory, translation literature and Stritzel’s discursive security framework, the article advances three claims: first, formulas worked out in village bargaining travel upward, supplying the terms of national settlement; second, localisation runs in both directions, dialogue reshaping the hierarchies through which bargaining continues; third, ideology conditions the degree of compromise groups are willing to make. By situating dialogue at the centre of governance, the study redefines the politics of insurgency, legitimacy and peacebuilding in the Sahel.