On 24 June 2026, traffic resumed on the strategic route linking Bamako to Mourdiah and Nara in central-western Mali after a weeks-long blockade imposed by the JNIM (Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin). More than the reopening itself, the way it happened deserves attention. According to available information, the return to circulation was not achieved through a decisive military operation by the state, but through mediation by local notables and community actors with the jihadist group.
This episode alone invites a rethink of how we understand conflict in the Sahel. It suggests that the dynamic is no longer just a series of offensives, retreats, or territorial conquests. It also plays out in the ability to open or close a road, ensure the continuity of trade, influence mobility, or condition the ordinary functioning of collective life. In other words, the center of gravity of competition seems to be shifting. The question may no longer be who controls a territory, but who actually exercises the functions that allow a society to operate—and thereby produces authority. Based on this hypothesis, I propose to re-read recent evolutions in JNIM strategy and, more broadly, the transformations of war and the making of authority in the Sahelian margins.
I. From territorial conquest to functional capture
What is changing in the Sahel today may not only be the geography of war; it is its object. Competition seems to be focusing less on the durable conquest of territories and more on controlling the functions that allow a society to function. 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 giving up attacks on armed forces, JNIM has gradually added road blockades, movement restrictions, supply interdictions, checks on trade corridors, and pressure on key routes linking Bamako to Kayes, Nioro-du-Sahel, Ségou, and Mourdiah. These operations produce effects far beyond the military dimension. 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, the war in the Sahel was understood through a mapping of controlled territories, conquered localities, or lost and retaken military positions. That reading remains relevant but is insufficient to grasp current transformations. JNIM is pushing further a logic found in several contemporary insurgencies: control of functions becomes progressively 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, ensuring continuity of trade, protecting supply chains, delivering justice, arbitrating conflicts, organizing taxation, and enforcing common rules. When these functions themselves become the main object of competition, the nature of conflict transforms. The question is no longer just who controls a territory, but who can ensure its functioning.
It is precisely on this ground that JNIM seems to be shifting the confrontation. The movement 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 group aims less at exercising complete territorial sovereignty than at appropriating the functions that, in the eyes of populations, ground the concrete usefulness of the state. Roads are probably the most visible expression of this transformation. They cease to be simple transport infrastructures and become real political institutions. Closing them, reopening them, filtering goods, taxing commercial flows, or conditioning population mobility amounts to exercising prerogatives traditionally associated with public authority. From 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 therefore 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 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 support for JNIM’s political project. It mainly reflects the constraints faced by populations whose survival depends on roads reopening, access to markets, and continuity of trade. In these circumstances, negotiation stems less from political preference than from a rationality of survival. 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, but also tensions around the production of local order.
This reality also invites a rethink of the making of the state. Since Max Weber, the modern state has been 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 us that all domination is inscribed in a plurality of registers of legitimacy, 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, but also with a legitimacy that JNIM progressively seeks to build. This does not primarily rely on the personal charisma of its leaders. It proceeds rather from its capacity to produce concrete order, to quickly arbitrate disputes, to secure certain circulation routes, to regulate markets, or to sanction behaviors it deems deviant. It is not, strictly speaking, a charismatic authority in Weber’s sense. JNIM tends rather to construct what could be called performative legitimacy: a legitimacy that stems neither from institutional status, nor from traditional heritage, nor exclusively from a leader’s prestige, 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 illustrates a configuration in which these different forms of authority do not substitute each other; 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 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 disenfranchisement, especially in territorial margins where state presence remains discontinuous. By investing in the concrete functions that structure people’s daily lives—securing movement, arbitrating conflicts, regulating exchanges, or organizing access to resources—it does not replace the state; it progressively shifts its center of gravity. The issue 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 heart of its practical legitimacy: the recognized capacity to durably produce collective order where populations live. Before contesting the monopoly of legitimate violence, it seems to me that JNIM seeks above all to acquire 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 is able to build a parallel state, but whether it is gradually reconfiguring the social conditions of authority production. The making of the state does not only proceed from constitutions, institutions, or coercive capacities; it also results from the daily recognition of 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 involuntarily, 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 being fought today in the Sahel may not primarily oppose two forces seeking to control a territory. It opposes two competing claims to become, in the eyes of populations, the actor capable of durably organizing collective life. In other words, the conflict is less about the monopoly of violence than about the socially recognized capacity to produce authority.
