“No other mission in contemporary times has been so costly in terms of bloodshed.” This was how Hervé Ladsous, undersecretary-general for peacekeeping from 2011 to 2017, summed up a dreadful year for the United Nations mission in Mali to the Security Council in January 2015. In the West African country’s war-hit north, peacekeepers were facing almost daily assaults by improvised explosive devices, ambushes, and suicide attacks, and the fatalities were swiftly adding up. Their mission was peacekeeping with no peace to keep; their blue helmets were themselves prime targets.1
In early 2012, Tuareg separatists had taken up arms in Mali’s desert north in what was to be the opening shot for prolonged insecurity in the region.2 A coup d’état led by disgruntled officers followed in the country’s capital, Bamako, while in the north, jihadists joined forces with—and eventually elbowed aside—the separatists who were clamoring for an independent state of Azawad. To cut off the advance of the jihadists, France launched a military campaign, Operation Serval, followed by a UN peacekeeping mission, the Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA), in 2013. MINUSMA’s presence has consolidated since that time, and a peace accord has briefly held out the promise of better times in Mali. Yet pervasive insecurity has proliferated in ways that are sadly emblematic of many international interventions of recent times, including Somalia and Afghanistan.
In this chapter, I explore how international actors have grappled with the situation in the Malian hinterland, casting a critical eye on the various forms of remote intervention that have enabled them to retain a presence amid mounting insecurity. I focus on the uneven mapping of danger and intervention—that is, the interaction between designated no-go zones and safe zones, and between the interveners and locals who are circulating in these spaces. The drawing of distance to remote danger, I will show, has come to define much of the international presence in Mali, yet it has largely failed to provide a sense of security and it has had negative impacts on Mali’s prospects for recovery from war.
Bamako, a sprawling city of about two million, is a key site on this danger-driven map of intervention. Far from the conflict-hit north, the capital has come to act as a hub for the various actors, including peacekeepers and small European nongovernmental organizations (NGO)s, who descended on the country from 2013 onward. Risk aversion led many of these international workers to remain in Bamako rather than deploy up north, which in turn meant that the spatial divide between capital and dangerous hinterland—already mapped onto Mali’s territory by foreign militaries and travel advisories in the preconflict days—was gradually reinforced. This partial presence in the country was accompanied by the imposition of a somewhat alien security model on Bamako itself (imported to a large extent from Kabul: see Florian Weigand’s chapter in this volume).
Although the Bamako base of the interveners strengthened the existing divide between headquarters and hinterland, risk management practices within Bamako itself deepened the divide between local city dwellers and the internationals. These dual forms of risk avoidance via growing distance on national as well as local/urban scales were to have negative consequences for intervention and the quest for peace and local acceptance, in a trend with broader implications for the organization of interventions in global crisis or conflict zones today.
In the first section, I consider international actors’ various means of managing risk and insecurity in the safe zone on Mali’s map of danger—that is, in their Bamako headquarters—before looking at how these attempts at drawing distance to danger easily crumble. Next, I sketch the broader geography of intervention, showing how the “dangerous” north came to stand in uneasy relation to the capital’s bunkered headquarters while danger kept eluding this neat geographical division and filtered into the city space, not least as Bamako was hit by high-profile terror attacks in 2015 (violence would also spread from the north into central Mali from this time onwards; these more recent developments are not covered in this chapter). Building on the headquarters–hinterland divide and its various tensions and overlaps, I conclude the chapter by asking what alternatives to remote-controlled intervention might be available, as well as what kind of social capabilities may be drawn upon to minimize the distance between intervener and intervened-on that has come to characterize international efforts in Mali and other crisis zones.
City of Risk: Bamako and the Mapping of Intervention
In 2014, my plane was descending toward Bamako’s Senou airport amid the heat-induced haze of May: fieldwork was finally beginning. The preparation had been drawn out, involving elaborate risk assessments and steep insurance payments at my university. Now, as I stepped onto the hot runway, already it was clear that some things had changed radically since my previous visits in 2001 and 2010–11. On the tarmac stood seven black-painted UN military planes, lined up in waiting for the cargo and personnel making their way to Mali’s war-scarred north. Inside the airport terminal, a Western woman scuttled between the police booths, overseeing Malian officers grappling with newly installed biometric equipment. Police aimed infrared pistols at us, screening for Ebola.
Mali, it was amply clear after only a few minutes back on its soil, was now a country under international tutelage, its security assured by UN and French soldiers and its borders controlled by Western devices and expertise. It was also marked by an edginess I had never experienced before, I thought, as I finally found a taxi in a remote corner of the airport parking lot. As we drove on empty streets toward central Bamako, I kept looking over my shoulder, as if on guard against an unlikely ambush.
As my taxi weaved its way into the busy city center, the French embassy reared into view. Unlike in earlier years, it was now clad with antiblast HESCO bastions (of the kind first used in Afghanistan) to shield against attacks, their bulky frames a reminder of the extensive French counterterror operation expanding from Mali across the wider Sahel region. White SUVs drove around on Bamako’s streets, “UN” emblazoned on the sides. At times, foreign soldiers in uniform strolled past. Bamako played host to a new set of visitors, military officers, UN workers, humanitarians, and security contractors. “Peaceland”—as Autesserre (2014) has called the self-contained world of international missions—had descended on Bamako like an extraterrestrial ship unloading its cargo and personnel, all according to the well-established global template of what Kaldor (2018) and Duffield (2001) have termed “liberal peace.”
On the face of it, Malians should have been happy with UN intervention. MINUSMA had arrived on the back of large promises of aid for Mali as the country returned to democracy and civilian rule. The arrival of the UN and associated actors was also welcome in another sense, as the departure of most aid workers during the conflict had caused havoc for Mali’s aid-dependent economy and local job prospects. Yet as I walked Bamako’s streets that May, eavesdropping on youths gathering for tea on street corners, discontent was palpable. Among the tea-drinking friendship groups (grins), the white UN four-wheel-drive vehicles rumbling through town failed to inspire confidence. “They are just here to eat,” said many locals I talked to, meaning the peacekeepers were in it only to gain something for themselves rather than help Mali recover from conflict.
This was perhaps an unfair assessment, but the mission’s setup in Bamako did its best to reinforce the mistrust. To Mali’s government, the decision to locate UN mission headquarters in the capital was a provocation, indicating the state’s failure to manage its own affairs. To the UN, however, the reason behind a Bamako base was simple: insecurity in the war-scarred north—that is, precisely the insecurity it was there to prevent. The UN agencies and peacekeepers had been slow to deploy up north; and as they did so, the protective measures there were even starker than in the capital. Although, in hindsight, such measures might have seemed reasonable given the mounting attacks on peacekeepers, initially the threat was less pronounced. In the northern towns of Gao, Timbuktu, and Kidal, peacekeepers and civilian UN staff lurked behind high walls, from where—or so locals complained—they rarely emerged to keep the people safe from attacks by rebels, jihadists or the Malian armed forces. Distance between local realities and the fortified “archipelago” of intervention (Duffield 2010) was growing wider.
The large UN presence in Bamako, meanwhile, was awkwardly detached from the existing urban fabric. As it was set up in mid-2013, MINUSMA had commandeered the five-star Hotel l’Amitié, which rose from the quarters of central Bamako. While locals complained about how much Mali paid for the UN’s highly visible presence, the hotel itself—whose pool on my last visit had been a favored haunt of the local elite—was now off-limits behind its cement vehicle barriers, curls of razor wire, and tanks operated by armed blue helmets. As UN staff drove up to the gates at lunchtime, they clogged the busy road outside, frustrating local drivers, much as the French embassy’s antiblast bastions did a few streets away.
The Bamako bunkering was indicative of a trend toward fortification of international missions that has existed since the 1990s, whether by the UN or by interveners such as the United States in postinvasion Baghdad (Chandrasekaran 2006). As noted in a growing body of studies (e.g. Duffield 2010; Fast 2014; Andersson and Weigand 2015), bunkering and buffering have increased distance to local society in a dangerous spiral that risks generating novel risks as contact points diminish and resentment stirs. This was also to be the case in Mali in 2014–16, the period of concern to this chapter.
It was not just the UN and Western governments that geared their operations toward the unseen dangers. Some international NGOs in Bamako had situated their offices close to easy evacuation routes should the worst happen. One large French aid organization had a map on its wall showing no-go zones where staff were not allowed to stop after 6:00 p.m.: two areas in town, plus anything beyond the Bamako city limits. “Stay in the Radisson,” one officer formerly involved in the EU military training mission in Mali (EUTM) had advised me before I left for Bamako, in words that now sound eerie following the 2015 terror attack there. “It’s the only hotel with armed guards.” Meanwhile, the hotel commandeered by EUTM in one of the capital’s leafier districts was now surrounded by fenced-in walkways and barriers to protect against attack; still, the military officers, many of them arriving fresh from Afghanistan, complained that protection was too basic compared with that in Kabul.
At night, EUTM officers holed up in Bamako’s posher restaurants along with other, largely Western, internationals. Their daytime and nighttime haunts constituted a circuit that was separate from mainstream Bamako life yet that affected the city’s workings in significant ways. In Bamako’s postdevelopment and posttourism days, the stopovers on this circuit were the cashpoints to which local entrepreneurs and workers were drawn. And it was one of them, the nightclub La Terrasse in a popular entertainment area, that was to be the first Bamako terrorist target in 2015, the year in which the “danger of the north” seeped south toward the capital and (more severely) the country’s central regions.
The consequence of those attacks would be further bunkering and separation, yet the key point here is that by that time, the international interveners already had distanced themselves from local society because of perceived insecurity, using templates imported from Afghanistan and the bunkerized UN presence elsewhere. This distance-making process involved physical barriers (HESCO bastions, bollards, fences) as well as subtler social means of separation (the circumscribed circuits of nightlife and daily work). Gradually, if imperfectly, Bamako was starting to exhibit something akin to the enclavization described in Sobia Ahmad Kaker’s chapter on Karachi in this volume. The international archipelago of intervention was creating its own discrete community spaces that were set apart from the diverse urban fabric around them.
Meanwhile, downtown Bamako still teemed in its urban ways. Its ramshackle central markets overflowed with imported Chinese goods and assorted magical charms, just as it had in 2001 on my first visit to the city. Bamako’s shared sotrama vehicles still plied the potholed routes, where new passengers still greeted strangers on board with “Ani sogoma” (good morning) or “Anoullah” (good evening), followed by long strings of inquiries into relatives’ health, as they squeezed onto the rickety benches. Bamako has sometimes been referred to as the world’s largest village, a sprawling collection of communities drawn from the rural base. Indeed, the city’s pronounced “urban capabilities” (Sassen 2012) for conviviality, as seen among sotrama passengers each day, depended greatly on the broader civic capabilities so characteristic of the postcolonial Malian nation as a whole (Pes 2011).
Amid the war and political shifts of 2012, key values associated with the Malian nation-building project functioned as partial bulwarks against the perceived sense of disintegration and corrosion of trust among conationals. Whitehouse (2013) has identified some of these capabilities that have helped to ensure good-neighborliness among different groups, including mɔgɔya, or “the eagerness to engage with other people socially in almost any situation”; danbe, or dignity, honor, and reputation—in short, a deep sense of rootedness in one’s own social past—faso kanu, “love of father’s house” or Malian patriotism; and senenkunya, or joking relations, at times including elaborate ritual insults. International visitors to Mali have long had a taste of this, and I sometimes found myself at the sharp end. As Amadou Diarra, the Malian moniker I acquired in 2001, during my first visit to the country, I have endured no end of taunts from my joking relations the Traorés, including the most profane assertions that I subsist on bush meat alone.
Besides such much-debated joking relations, anthropologists such as Pes (2011, 30) have shown how the flexibility and openness of less visible forms of group membership—in terms of age, descent, and residence longevity—have allowed for a peaceful social fabric to develop in many parts of Mali. This is not an urban capability per se (Pes’s study is rural), but it is clear to any casual visitor to Bamako how much of this interpersonal interaction has traveled into the “world’s largest village.” This included the thousands of internally displaced people (IDPs) who came to the capital after 2012. Reaffirming their strong civic ethos, Bamako residents took pride in their tradition of djatiguiya (welcoming) as they hosted IDPs for months or even years in their own homes. In the courtyard of a friend of mine in southern Bamako, for instance, some eight families had squatted for well over a year; elsewhere richer IDPs helped by hosting their fellow northerners in spare rooms. Even as the initial warm welcome ebbed amid strains on resources, the displaced, rather than bringing conflict into the city, were by and large integrated into its urban fabric.
That was not the case, however, for the much more privileged international interveners descending on Bamako in the IDPs’ wake. Instead of integrating into the urban fabric, as earlier generations of mostly Western expatriates had tried to do when Mali was pictured as a “donor darling” and key development partner, the new interveners largely sidestepped it. In their set-aside “safe” locations (offices, hotels, poolside homes, and expensive restaurants), the expats clustered at one remove from local society. The new arrivals had little interest in or even knowledge of the joking relations that developed among Malians and earlier generations of visitors—understandably so, perhaps, as many were likely to leave soon anyway on another assignment in “Peaceland.” Instead, the interveners tended to cement relations among themselves, leading to growing proximity among military, aid, and peacebuilding sectors while distance to local realities grew.
This failure to participate in the urban and civic fabric of Bamako fueled mistrust. In Bamako, fingers were pointed at the white four-wheel drives; look, they are out hunting for girls again, or heading for another glitzy party! Some aid workers and UN officials sometimes tried their best to mitigate local resentment, but given the risk-averse structure of the international presence, this was a losing prospect. One UN adviser had tried to get a taxi scheme in place for MINUSMA staff, to spread some of the benefits of the mission to local drivers rather than rely on UN-provided, supposedly secure, transport to and from work. This failed, however, he recounted with frustration, owing to a combination of strict risk management protocols and the usual UN bureaucracy. In the end, most expatriates resigned themselves to the restrictions while finding temporary escape in the bars and restaurants of the international scene.
The expat bubble of Bamako that resulted was in many ways a cut-price version of the “Kabubble” in Afghanistan (Andersson and Weigand 2015). Instead of integrating into the urban fabric, the expat community developed its own separate dynamics: loud parties and poolside dinners behind guarded gates, followed by a drive home to the international compound by employer-vetted drivers. At my guesthouse, one night a worker displaced from his native Dogon country, where he had worked as a tourist guide before the conflict, asked as the reggae started booming and glasses clinking on the terrace upstairs: “If you’re in a country to help it, you don’t go out like that at night, no, you spend all your time thinking about it, right? How is this helping Malians?”
As other authors have emphasized in recent years—notably Autesserre (2014), Smirl (2015), and Duffield (2010)—we need to pay close attention to the everyday organization and infrastructures of intervention to understand its impact and consequences. This brief look at the physical and social organization of intervention in the urban milieu of Bamako has highlighted two features: first, the spatial clustering of privileged (often Western) internationals in the headquarters of the capital, distanced from the northern frontlines; and, second, the peculiar distance developing between Bamako residents and this latest generation of international visitors. Yet this leaves us with an incomplete picture of Mali’s geography of intervention and conflict. For a fuller view, we need to look toward the country’s north and to the workers tasked with bringing peace to it in a faltering manner.
Remotely Uncontrolled: Protests and Peril in Mali’s North
As the UN mission commenced in mid-2013, Mali’s map was divided into zones of danger and deployment. While the French counterterror forces—first under Serval and then under the regionwide successor mission, Barkhane—lurked in the northern hinterlands, other interveners remained unevenly spread across Malian territory, corralled in bastions and cocooned by their SUVs. Their lopsided presence helped congeal Mali’s geography of intervention into red and green zones while imposing a division of labor between local, “regional” (African), and “international” staff.
A quick traipse around the lobby of the MINUSMA headquarters hotel—clad with pictures of African peacekeepers, I discovered as I finally made it past the bollards and guards—made clear that the northern frontline tasks had been left largely in the hands of regional forces. Their task was a tough one, and more trouble was brewing for them during that tense May of 2014.
In the restive regions of Kidal and Gao, low-ranking African soldiers had been thrown in at the deep end while the mission’s groaning civilian support system frequently failed to supply them with food and water. UN salaries were not being paid because of administrative glitches, adding to the chaos. The frontline Africans had no armored cars, scant protection, and little preparation for the dangers ahead; sitting atop their open pickups, they were low-hanging fruit for armed factions wishing to make a violent impact. Some European military officers asked in private whether the UN leadership was racist, as it exposed these soldiers to risks that would be unthinkable for Western or even Asian troops, the former stalwarts of peacekeeping missions.
In stark contrast to the mission overkill down in the bloated Bamako headquarters, frontline soldiers from countries including Guinea and Chad were largely left to fend for themselves behind their crumbling camp walls—and fend some of them did. In 2014, reports surfaced of soldiers deserting and even attacking the local population.3 Still, the UN and its member states were content that someone was up there “keeping the peace,” not least since MINUSMA’s African soldiers highlighted the so-called regional ownership of crises that new missions were supposed to be all about.
The Chadians, who had joined the Malian frontlines first as part of the French counterterror operations, only to be eventually (and partially) incorporated into the UN peacekeeping force, were exemplary of this trend toward Africanized deployments. “They are savages, but they are good,” was how one peacekeeping officer in New York bluntly described them to me. Unsurprisingly, they would also end up being the largest takers of casualties on Mali’s postintervention frontlines.
While African deaths racked up, Western troop contributors kept swelling the ranks of the new intelligence functions of MINUSMA, initially at a safe distance in Bamako. Despite their secure existence in a hangar outside the airport during 2014, the soldiers’ arrival was preceded by media reports back home about the risks they faced. Some Europeans—first Swedes and Dutch—did eventually deploy to the north as part of a bid by their governments for an upcoming Security Council seat. However, unlike their northern-deployed African counterparts, the Europeans were Special Forces–equipped with armored cars, Apache helicopters, surveillance drones, and their own mobile medical teams. The Europeans’ role was to complement the non-Western forces with intelligence and Special Forces capabilities, not to supplant the latter in their patrolling duties, for which they remained woefully underprepared. The result was a constant withdrawal behind camp walls by the Africans, leading to more local anger about UN inaction.4
In sectors other than peacekeeping, a similar Africanization of northern operations was under way. European military trainers with EUTM were not allowed to venture into northern Mali, where the Malian battalions it trained were posted as soon as the soldiers completed their drills. Meanwhile, in the aid sector, Malian and regional workers—that is, black or otherwise “Malian-looking” staff—almost exclusively maintained the operations of UN agencies and international NGOs.5
This racial and regional division of labor was not altogether new. Rather, it expanded on arrangements put in place a few years before the 2012 conflict, as international staff had increasingly been withdrawn from the north because of security risks (Bergamaschi 2014, 354). Yet although it was true that jihadists had kidnapped Westerners, killing some and demanding huge ransoms for others, Malian staff also were at risk of attacks, as aid workers emphasized in interviews. Even if no spectacular murders of Malians had yet taken place, four Malians working for the International Committee of the Red Cross had been kidnapped in early 2014. Besides, the fear of attacks on internationals did not correspond with the limited such attacks until that point: as one UN officer collating these data told me that May, “Mali’s not Afghanistan.” However, in a reflection of the moniker “Africa’s Afghanistan” that some security pundits had assigned to Mali after 2012, the measures rolled out in the country, from bunkering to subcontracting, already resonated with arrangements in the simmering Afghan war well before the violence started escalating.
To return to the topic of mapping of insecurity and danger, deployments in Mali were unequally spread across its unevenly risky territory. The division of labor in the military and aid sectors reinforced the distance between categories of interveners: African peacekeepers on patrol versus Western military trainers in Bamako and intelligence gatherers equipped with drones; Malian and West African frontline workers versus international (to a large extent Western) aid managers in the capital.
To the aid managers, however, the distance between headquarters and hinterland could be overcome through “remote management” and related techniques. Previously applied in Somalia and other conflict-hit countries, such procedures enabled project managers in Bamako to check in with partner organizations or lower-ranking employees in the field via e-mail, phone, or occasional “flash visits.” In the UN mission, a similar remote relationship developed between headquarters and the hinterland. The danger zone remained at a distance yet comfortably within reach through modern technology and administrative procedures—or so went the story before the worst possible news hit the headlines in May 2014, in which the northern danger would end up encroaching on the capital, not for the last time.
The trouble started with a visit by the Malian prime minister to Kidal. The northern town had been left as the bastion of the rebels from the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) after the French intervention, much to Bamako’s chagrin. The French were playing a double game in the north, keeping the MNLA rebels as allies while routing jihadists in the hinterland. The premier now wanted to give this arrangement a push as he arrived in Kidal on May 17 with the intention of showing support for patriotic locals and state administrators.
He failed. As the prime minister tried to make it into central parts of Kidal, armed men took officials at the town’s governorate hostage. Then, as Malian forces attacked and French and UN soldiers stood by, the hostages were executed.
Soon, protests began. On our grainy guesthouse television, I saw protesters screaming into the night in downtown Bamako: rumor had it that a UN vehicle had been torched. The next day aid workers were scrambling to exit the north, but no flights were leaving. Anger against perceived UN and French inaction in Kidal was mounting, as was anger against northern Tuaregs and Arabs, who were seen as partial to the separatist cause. Mali was yet again a tinderbox about to ignite; yet the Kidal events were only the start of the cruelest week Mali had seen for some time.
“Have you heard the news?” I was in a plush hotel in northern Bamako on the night of May 21 when a European researcher broke the latest developments to me. Malian forces, some of them recently trained and equipped by the EU, had attacked the rebels in Kidal without informing the French or MINUSMA, then the MNLA had routed them. Kidal had fallen, followed by Menaka farther south. “The Malian soldiers just ran away,” the researcher said; she reported that they hid in the UN camp while the rebels stole their EU-provided vehicles. We walked upstairs to the hotel restaurant, set on a terrace brimming with soldiers and UN workers, to dine with a friend of ours from an NGO. What would the implications be here in Bamako?
Over dinner, our friend looked out over the gathered men in uniforms. “I shouldn’t really be here,” she said, but let it be. Bamako’s expat humanitarians tried to keep separate from the military, yet socially speaking, this was proving impossible; they mingled on the same circuit, stuck in the same high-end haunts. Our researcher colleague was nervous, too; she was not allowed to go anywhere on foot, according to new security instructions from somewhere (her embassy? Intelligence? She would not say). Instead, she borrowed our friend’s designated driver and left, as the NGO worker confided that she, too, was not really allowed to move around this area after dark.
The next day, I awoke to a Bamako in lockdown mode. Angry crowds gathered outside MINUSMA’s headquarters and the French embassy’s antiblast barriers. My meetings were canceled. International organizations told their staff to stay indoors and away from the center. An interviewee from EUTM could not meet with me, he explained, because they were in “alternative planning” for the foreseeable future. Military officers such as himself could not leave their barricaded hotel without security escort, and their barracks outside the capital were under curfew. Up north, further protests were brewing, and aid workers started evacuating the city; the situation was swiftly getting out of hand.
The protests and the rekindled northern troubles, which were eventually quelled as the Malian government softened its tone, revealed the fragile hold of international interveners on the north. Having failed to capitalize on initial local trust, the UN and France had instead built more distance from local society, paving the way for a spiral of negative rumors and resentment about their role in stabilizing the country. Meanwhile, the Malian state was withdrawing its scattered presence in the north, reducing any lingering administrative hold even further. The efforts toward breaking the northern deadlock had faltered, and the divide between south and north—and between operational headquarters and the northern hinterland—was growing deeper.
A Giant on Clay Feet
Even before the Kidal events that May, frustration was running high among the frontline soldiers facing the dangers up north, as well as among headquartered military officers in Bamako. Some soldiers and civilian staffers saw MINUSMA as the “most chaotic UN mission ever.” Its structure was uncommunicative; its offices were disconnected, sometimes literally so; and its logistics chain was faulty.
One Swedish soldier, Mikael, summed up the predicament by calling MINUSMA “a giant with a bloated head and clay feet.” By this he meant that large numbers of bureaucrats had congregated in Bamako’s Hotel l’Amitié while the dangerous sections of the north were in the hands of unprepared African soldiers. This division, it was clear to Mikael, had contributed to the protests, killings, and chaos of May 2014. MINUSMA’s chain of command was faulty, he said; the mission should have supported the French as they planned to liberate the hostages in Kidal, but this did not happen—and for that reason the French would not enter either, leading to the atrocity.
For this Mikael blamed inept African leadership. In the UN, “everyone’s supposed to be the same,” he said, echoing many of his Western military colleagues. By this he meant that officers who were inherited from an earlier West African military mission of 2013 were seen as on par with highly trained NATO counterparts.6 In a face-saving exercise, the military commanders of MINUSMA were all African, Mikael said, even though some could barely use a computer; other officers mumbled similar complaints. Yet the fundamental problem was not simply about a few bad apples: rather, it was about much wider questions around the politics of intervention—including the rollout of a division of labor and of an unequal risk template unsuited to Malian realities, as discussed in this chapter.
In sum, the so-called multidimensional and integrated MINUSMA mission was beset by multidimensional problems. For a start, it could easily be accused of inhabiting a gray zone between counterterror and “liberal peace” approaches to security, in addition to being hobbled by the various political problems attached to integrated missions since the 1990s (see, e.g., Duffield 2010; Charbonneau 2017). On a practical level, it was stymied by ill-equipped soldiers and officers, bad communication, social divisions, dreadful logistics, and bureaucratic overhang. The efforts of the many highly able military and civilian staff in HQ were bludgeoned by a chaotic system at every turn—a system, moreover, imported from templates that had failed elsewhere and that has been applied without much thought.
In the politically hostile Mali context, this chaos spelled disaster both for the prospect of peace and for the more immediate safety of those at the sharp end of intervention, whether locals, blue helmets, or humanitarians. Cowed by fear of external threats, the UN mission had not addressed its internal mess (Fast 2014), which was now adding greatly to the risks for staff and locals, along with political questions around MINUSMA’s awkward role.
Among these risks was one that had been left to linger amid the obsession with insecurity: political risk. As noted, it was becoming amply clear that most Malians had had enough of the international presence. “The Africans among them come here with deals,” alleged one local aid worker. “They might pay 20 percent to their boss [for being sent on a mission], so why would they take any risks?” In this critique, shared by other workers, a bunkered existence in the north meant that the money just kept rolling in (in theory, at least, given that pay was sometimes withheld by superiors). To make up for the shortfall or simply to moonlight, soldiers sold their supplies—including UN-provided water bottles—to middlemen. These later ended up on markets in the north, undercutting merchants.
Besides the financial side effects of deployment, there were also more insidious social consequences. Prostitution was becoming rife in a country with a limited market to begin with, according to some aid workers. In Gao, one NGO worker recalled in dismay, poor young women had been coming to a clinic for AIDS tests. They were not the typical profile for these tests, so the doctor asked them why—and was told it was because the soldiers asked them to show their paperwork before sleeping with them. The implications of all this were dire in a once-proud and deeply Muslim country, which was moreover trying to recover from a jihadist takeover.
If the military and political sides of the mission were languishing, the humanitarian efforts of the UN and the NGOs were doing only marginally better. Accusations flew about frittered-away assistance. In Bamako, aid for displaced people had disappeared into the pockets of partner staff or false beneficiaries. Up north, the wastage was worsened by the division of labor created by “remote programming,” expat aid workers said when speaking in private. One recalled a flash visit of hers to a northern town, where an NGO had organized distributions of supplies via the head of the village, who simply had given everything to his own relatives. “I was shocked!”
This should not be shocking. The squandering of aid is a long-standing problem, as is to be expected when vast humanitarian supplies suddenly enter a crisis-hit area. In northern Mali, this had been the case since the 1970s droughts—yet now the corruption was worsened by lack of oversight, as headquarter staff remained in Bamako, at one remove from the scramble for funds.
Some donors were becoming increasingly skeptical and outspoken about the failed aid efforts. One representative of a major European funding body said: “It’s incredible … in Kidal, Gao, and Timbuktu, there’s a frustration [with the UN] that is turning toward the humanitarians, but no one talks about this!” To him, one key problem was the “self-limitation” imposed on NGOs: “it’s security that justifies everything.” When he took field trips to remote parts of the north, NGO managers rarely joined him. Instead, they stayed in Bamako, with its endless meetings, parties, and paper-pushing. “They eat all resources, produce reports, and create new little strategies,” he said, echoing Malian complaints about the inaction of peacekeepers. “They have to justify their salaries!” The “absorption capacity” of these remotely managed NGOs was “nonexistent,” he said, which in turn limited the sums that funders were willing to cough up for new projects. “We see cartons of Plumpy’Nut [a nutritional supplement] in the market of Gao, and the supplies that are distributed just disappear.” Worse, there was a lack of “accountability toward beneficiaries.” To him, remote management was all about more remoteness and no management, creating a huge acceptance problem.
“Who was attacked when [rebels] entered Menaka?” he asked, referring to the armed groups’ entry into this northern town after the Malian forces’ routing in Kidal in May 2014. It was two large international NGOs with little local acceptance, he said, rather than Médecins du Monde, which had built up a strong local presence since the conflict. “It’s the ones that don’t have a grounding in the community who are being attacked.” As with the UN peacekeepers, the humanitarians had let an obsession with external threats to expat staff drive their strategies, with severe consequences for their operations and local workers’ safety.
Soon after the May protests in Bamako and Gao had receded, the attack came that aid agencies had long feared. Two Malian humanitarian workers were killed in the north when their vehicle was blown up by a remote device. Their employer was a frontline partner to the UN High Commission for Refugees and had been using one of UNHCR’s white vehicles. The NGO’s global head flew in to pay his respects, but as expected, little news reached Western audiences of this tragedy, unlike what would be the case if Western workers had been killed. A week later, a suicide bomber rammed his way into a crumbling peacekeeping camp, leaving four Chadian soldiers dead, again gaining minimal media coverage. In the coming months, attacks on peacekeepers escalated via suicide bombs, lobbed missiles, and improvised explosive devices. By the end of February 2015, there were forty-six dead in the mission; five were Asian and forty-one were African, with eighteen of these from Chad alone. And the numbers swiftly rose.7
It was amid this bloodshed that the UN peacekeeping chief stepped in to the Security Council to deplore the violent attacks. Casualties could mount for only so long before eyebrows were raised, including by the otherwise steadfast Chadian government. While discussions unfolded in New York, back in Mali it was clear by late 2014 that the UN—poised between the resentment of southern Malians for their seeming inaction and renewed targeting by supposed jihadist fighters in the north—had been drawn into the Mali conflict, not as keepers of an elusive peace but as hapless combatants and soft targets while the French reorganized their forces. Instead of distancing themselves from the northern danger zone, they had been pulled right into it.
The barriers erected to shield the internationals from local society and regional threats kept failing to bring security. In early 2015, as protests against the UN unfolded yet again, peacekeepers fired into the crowds outside the MINUSMA camp in Gao, killing three and stirring yet more protest. Meanwhile, as noted, insecurity kept spreading across the north and into Mali’s central regions as the peace process between rebels and government faltered. In 2015, terror attacks pierced the Bamako bubble before extending farther across the region, hitting neighboring Burkina Faso and its capital, Ouagadougou, in 2016.
As other chapters in this volume show, diffuse danger and bunkering often develop hand in hand in a vicious cycle. The initial mapping of danger onto Mali’s territory and the unequal portioning of risky tasks across this map of intervention had partly “insured” more powerful Western interveners against the risks, yet the costs were significant, too, as seen in the political blowback of mounting protests and in the Bamako attacks of 2015. If the interveners had somehow shifted tack and tried to integrate into the urban fabric—as previous generations of development workers had done—perhaps the political and security risks could have been contained as tensions rose. Instead, once trouble hit, separation grew. Instead of outreach to local society came more bunkering and further withdrawal. One European intelligence officer, reflecting on the eventual move of UN military headquarters from Amitié to Senou airport, recalled Somalia, where the African Union and UN have clustered for years in a high-security compound next to the Mogadishu airfield, as far removed from local society as possible and always with one eye on the exit route. Using a metaphor deployed by drone warriors, he described the international interveners as looking down on northern Mali through a soda straw, seeing only a tiny portion of its social terrain without managing to escape their heavily protected yet fundamentally fragile ivory tower.
Conclusion: The Quest for Connection
The Mali story since 2013 is a sobering one but perhaps should be expected. In part, it is a story of the blurry UN mandates and ill-applied mission templates that academics and officials have long criticized. It is clear by now that traditional peacekeeping models do not fit the “new wars” of the post–cold war era, characterized by a multitude of armed factions working from predatory and exclusivist agendas (Kaldor 1999), nor do they work well alongside the war on terror and its regional and local iterations. In Mali, security involves not only an array of international forces via MINUSMA but also foreign counterterror operations and externally imposed border security, all of which interact with the often violent Malian security apparatus. In addition to these official constellations, an ever-expanding range of armed factions, jihadist groups, and government-sponsored militias compete to control key smuggling routes through the desert, or patches of central and northern Mali, while individuals often switch sides and hold multiple allegiances in a confusing array of constellations (Strazzari and Whitehouse 2015). In this context, the UN is dealing with something more akin to criminal syndicates, which requires a vastly different type of intervention from that adopted during the cold war.
Instead of squaring up to this challenge, however, the reaction has been to withdraw from it—both in the political sense of sticking to the wider UN template and in the physical sense of drawing distance to the problem. One adviser to the UN deputy secretary-general, frustrated with the lack of progress, asked me in New York, “If the price to be up north is essentially that we have to hunker down in bunkers, then what’s the point?” No stabilization, no policing, no securing of areas could happen from within the fortress, he said—and much less so when the biggest fortress of all was a thousand kilometers south, in Bamako.
Worse, and to return to the key theme of this chapter, the fortress model and its associated division of labor is at best a clumsy protection mechanism against asymmetric warfare tactics that, as the editors of this volume put it in the introduction, “find in cities one major site for their enactment.” The enemy is swift on its feet, dominating social media and spreading news of even the most distant attack on peacekeepers far and wide within hours or minutes. In this game, the biggest prize with the most “juice” (to cite one international worker) was precisely the well-guarded compounds and plush hotels such as the Radisson: they ensured instant coverage across international media.8 By contrast, the UN operated a creaking machinery. Reusing the Swedish soldier’s description, MINUSMA’s clay feet were, by 2014–15, wobbling from asymmetric attacks, as well as from the resentment besetting its very presence in Mali.
Two caveats are in order. First, armed groups had their own interests in continued violence that would persist no matter what the interveners did or did not do. Second, Western internationals were present in the north, as noted, but in a very limited sense. The Swedes and Dutch (and, later, Germans) handled intelligence, while the latter plus the French conducted violent raids. Yet this kind of military engagement remained bare-boned. Tuareg groups sometimes referred to the Dutch forces as “tourists” as a means of disparaging them after their raids, which moreover could lead to severe negative blowback for the less well prepared—and non-European—parts of the UN mission. The risks, in other words, were real, yet the ways in which they were handled, mapped, and distributed were shaped by the political geography of danger, distance, and withdrawal.
A very different path for Mali and its interveners could be chosen. Instead of strengthening the divide between headquartered capital and dangerous hinterland, interveners must take risks and deploy into areas where they can make a difference and start building genuine relationships with local groups that hold the key to ending conflict. Instead of strengthening bunker walls, risk protocols, and unequal divisions of labor, interveners have broad scope for weaving themselves into the social fabric on a more equal footing. Here, the solution to Mali’s troubles must, to a large extent, be found in the very civic capabilities mentioned earlier in this chapter. Taking us back to the discussion of urban subjects in the introduction to this volume, we must note, however, that urban modes of conviviality in Bamako are part of a much larger sociocultural fabric that has sustained Mali throughout the postcolonial period. Further, in the deserted north, connectivity has long been a “precondition for human survival” (Scheele 2012, 14). Establishing connections that have been torn apart by conflict and competing economic interests, while building new ones among northerners, southerners, and interveners, is essential for moving out of the impasse of confrontation, protest, violence, and withdrawal.
Besides building on Mali’s varied civic capabilities, those of the interveners themselves also need to be thrown into the mix. Indeed, many international interveners were acutely aware of the limitations of the disconnected mode of business in Mali and actively tried to go beyond it, as noted in passing above. Some aid workers and UN officials skirted stringent security protocols to travel north on missions. Others tried to tweak or subvert UN rules within Bamako—including by venturing out of the fortified hotel headquarters to talk to protesters and listen to their views. One leader of a Swedish peacekeeping contingent explained to me in spring 2016 how he had actively gone beyond the risk-averse strictures of his Timbuktu mission and helped to defend the town against attackers while meeting rebel leaders. Another UN worker recalled how she had almost single-handedly been running one of the most dangerous camps in northern Mali. In other words, the civic capabilities of workers can be harnessed and tied into Mali’s civic fabrics, which remain paramount.
To return to one key example from this chapter, the Bamako hosts of northern IDPs stand as a model of hospitality in times of adversity. Their city of open compound doors, rather than the divided city of barricaded enclaves, can perhaps lead the way toward a different model of engagement with a supposedly Malian conflict that at its heart is a globalized problem searching for a global as well as a local solution.
Notes
This article draws on materials from the author’s monograph No Go World with University of California Press (Andersson 2019) and from his article in Current Anthropology (Andersson 2016). University of California Press and Current Anthropology are gratefully acknowledged.
1. See Associated Press reports of the meeting on January 6, 2015.
2. Space constraints preclude a longer discussion of the history and dynamics of Mali’s conflict. For one multiauthored intervention, see Lecocq et al. 2013; on MINUSMA, see also Charbonneau 2017.
3. See Tham Lindell and Nilsson 2014 on logistics problems and reports of attacks on local communities.
5. The policy on using nonwhite staff in the north was rarely formalized explicitly but was common among all the UN agencies and NGOs I interviewed. Sometimes it included deploying black Western staff north as well, some workers said. Local (Malian) staff also would include northern Tuareg; that is, not only black Africans.
6. Sweden is not part of NATO, but its military forces have become closely aligned with NATO, including through participation in both Libya and Afghanistan.
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