On 24 June 2026, traffic resumed on the strategic road connecting Bamako to Mourdiah and Nara in central-western Mali, after several weeks of blockade imposed by JNIM (Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin). More than the reopening itself, it is how it came about that demands attention. The return to circulation was not achieved through a decisive military operation by the state, but through mediation by local dignitaries and community leaders with the jihadist group.
This episode alone invites a reconsideration of certain frameworks for understanding conflict in the Sahel. It suggests that the dynamics of the conflict are no longer limited to a succession of offensives, retreats, or territorial conquests. They also play out in the ability to open or close a road, to ensure the continuity of exchanges, to influence mobility, or to condition the ordinary functioning of collective life. In other words, the centre of gravity of the competition seems to be gradually shifting. Thus, the question may no longer be simply who controls a territory, but rather who actually exercises the functions that allow a society to operate and, in doing so, produces authority. Based on this hypothesis, I propose to re-read recent developments in JNIM’s strategy and, more broadly, the transformations of war and the production of authority on the Sahelian margins.
I. From territorial conquest to the conquest of functions
What is changing today in the Sahel may not only be the geography of war; it is its object. The competition seems to focus less and less on lasting territorial conquest and more and more on controlling the functions that make a society work. 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 integrated into its action repertoire road blockades, movement restrictions, supply bans, controls on trade routes, and pressure on the main corridors linking Bamako to Kayes, Nioro-du-Sahel, Ségou, and Mourdiah. These operations produce effects that go far beyond the military dimension. They affect supply chains, market functioning, people’s mobility, economic activities, and more broadly, the ordinary conditions of collective life.
This evolution reflects a strategic change. For a long time, war in the Sahel was understood through a cartography of controlled territories, conquered localities, and lost and recaptured military positions. This reading remains relevant, but it has become insufficient to understand the current transformations of the conflict. JNIM is now pushing further a logic found in several contemporary forms of insurgency: control of functions becomes as important as control of spaces.
A state exists not only because it exercises sovereignty over a territory. It also exists because it fulfils a set of functions that populations consider essential: securing movement, guaranteeing the continuity of exchanges, protecting supply chains, dispensing justice, arbitrating conflicts, organising taxation, and enforcing common rules. When these functions themselves become the main object of competition, the nature of the conflict changes. The question is no longer just who controls a territory, but who is able to ensure its functioning.
It is precisely on this ground that JNIM appears to move the confrontation. The movement does not necessarily seek to directly administer the territories where it is present. Instead, it seems to invest in the functions that make the state socially indispensible, while leaving the costs of daily administration to the state. I call this process a functional capture of the state: a strategy by which an armed actor seeks less to exercise full territorial sovereignty than to appropriate the functions that, in the eyes of the populations, underpin the concrete usefulness of the state. Roads are probably the most visible expression of this transformation. They cease to be mere transport infrastructure and become true political institutions. Closing them, reopening them, filtering goods, taxing commercial flows, or conditioning the mobility of populations amounts to exercising prerogatives traditionally associated with public authority. In this perspective, controlling a road is no longer just controlling a space; it is controlling the economic and social interactions that cross that space.
This shift from control of territories to control of flows constitutes, in my view, one of the most significant strategic transformations of the war in the Sahel. The real question may therefore no longer be who occupies the territories, but who controls the functions that give meaning to these territories. Because when functions change hands before territories, the very nature of the conflict changes.
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 imply adherence to JNIM’s political project. It mainly reflects the constraints faced by populations whose survival depends on reopening roads, access to markets, and continuity of exchanges. In these circumstances, negotiation stems less from political preference than from a rationality of survival. However, it would be wrong to view these communities as a homogeneous bloc. Traders, transporters, customary chiefs, religious authorities, herders, and rural youth do not have the same interests or the same relationships with armed groups. It is precisely these divergences that make communities permanent spaces of negotiation, compromise, and also tension over the production of local order.
This reality also invites us to rethink the making of the state. Since Max Weber, the modern state has been conceived as a form of political organisation capable of institutionalising authority through a rational-legal order. Its legitimacy rests on the impersonality of rules, bureaucracy, and the monopoly of legitimate physical violence. However, the Weberian analysis also reminds us that any domination is embedded in a plurality of registers of legitimacy, where rational-legal, traditional, and charismatic forms can coexist, compete, or reinforce each other.
The 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 is gradually trying to build. This legitimacy is not primarily based on the personal charisma of its leaders. It derives rather from its ability to produce a concrete order, to quickly arbitrate disputes, to secure certain traffic routes, to regulate markets, or to punish behaviour it deems deviant. This is not, strictly speaking, a charismatic authority in the Weberian sense. JNIM tends rather to construct what could be called performative legitimacy: a legitimacy that stems neither from an institutional status, nor from a traditional heritage, nor exclusively from the prestige of a leader, but from the repeated demonstration of its capacity to exercise certain functions that populations usually associate with the state. The lifting of the Mourdiah and Nara blockade thus illustrates a configuration in which these different forms of authority do not replace each other; they coexist, compete, and sometimes interlock. The state retains its institutional legality; traditional authorities mobilise their social capital to preserve local balances; while JNIM seeks to convert its coercive capacity into governance 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 disempowerment, particularly in the territorial margins where state presence remains discontinuous. By investing in the concrete functions that structure the daily life of populations—securing movement, arbitrating conflicts, regulating exchanges, or organising access to resources—it does not replace the state; it gradually shifts the centre of gravity. The issue is no longer to occupy the institutions of central power, but to transfer, in the peripheries, the functions that underpin political authority. The state remains legally sovereign, but it risks losing what constitutes, in the Weberian sense, the core of its practical legitimacy: the recognised capacity to sustainably produce collective order where populations live. Before challenging the monopoly of legitimate violence, it seems to me that JNIM primarily seeks to acquire a socially recognised capacity to produce authority in spaces where the state has become intermittent.
Conclusion
In this sense, the real challenge may no longer be whether JNIM can build a parallel state, but whether it is gradually reconfiguring the social conditions of authority production. The making of the state does not proceed solely from constitutions, institutions, or coercive capacities; it also results from the daily recognition of whoever guarantees security, organises exchanges, arbitrates conflicts, and makes collective life predictable. Every successful mediation, every reopened road, every dispute settled outside public institutions contributes, even unintentionally, 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 the populations, the most credible actor for ensuring security, dispensing justice, guaranteeing mobility, and producing a predictable order. The decisive battle now being waged in the Sahel may not first pit two forces seeking to control a territory. It pits two competing claims to become, in the eyes of the populations, the actor capable of sustainably organising collective life. In other words, the conflict is less about the monopoly of violence than about the socially recognised capacity to produce authority.
