Jihadist Governance and Gendered Agency in the Sahel: Women, Civilians, and Political Order from Below
as part of the course l'Africa nelle relazioni internazionali
In a rapidly changing global order, Africa can no longer be understood as peripheral to international politics. Rather, it emerges as a crucial site where local dynamics and transnational processes intersect, overlap, and mutually reshape one another. This seminar series foregrounds the concept of agency to explore how political, social, and economic actors across the continent actively produce and navigate these local–transnational entanglements.
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Abstract
This lecture examines how armed Islamist insurgencies in the Sahel produce political order and how non-state agency—especially women’s and civilians’—shapes everyday governance under conditions of chronic insecurity. After a brief contextualization of Sahelian insurgency dynamics and an introduction to key jihadist actors, the session focuses on “governance from below”: justice provision, taxation, moral regulation, and social control as practical institutions of rule. The core of the lecture explores women’s agency within and around jihadist insurgencies, moving beyond the victim–perpetrator binary to analyse roles, motivations, and the gendered norms through which legitimacy and authority are built. Drawing on feminist security studies and African feminist scholarship, the lecture shows how gender operates as a governing infrastructure and how agency often takes ambivalent, relational, and strategically “invisible” forms.