This week’s baraza was part of the Islam in African Group annual symposium held from April 1-2 with a title of Muslim Africa and Changing Global Interconnections.
Professor Mohammad-Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou, who was invited to talk, is a political historian and public intellectual. Currently, he is a Deputy Director and professor of International History and Politics at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. Under the new joint Direction, professor Mohamedou is Director of the graduate Institute of Geneva Executive Education. Since 2013, he teaches at the Doctorial School at Science Po Paris. Previously, he served as the Deputy Director and Academic Dean of the Geneva Center for Security Policy. Professor Mohamedou was also Mauritania’s Minister of foreign Affairs and Cooperation (2008-2009). Professor Mohamedou is the author of a trilogy on the post-September 11 era: Contre-Croisade (2004), Understanding Al Qaeda (2011) and A Theory of ISIS (2018), editor of State-Building in the Middle East and North Africa (2021) and co-editor of Democratisation in the 21st Century (2016). He is the recipient of the 2021 Global South Distinguished Scholar Award of the International Studies Association (ISA).
Professor Mohamedou opened his talk by making propositions to cover three issues in his talk: 1) the contemporary mapping of Africa and global affairs and, specifically, as regards to the scholarly and therefore from it the policy outlook, 2) concerns on the religion of Islam, and 3) the role of the non-state actors, more specifically, the armed groups in reshaping the African politics from within.
Although they are part and parcel of a global reshaping, most of the issues he discussed are local in a sense that continental and historically produced.
Addressing the first issue, professor Mohamedou highlighted that despite the critical academic works since Edward Said’s Orientalism in 1978 and Cultural imperialism in 1994, the world continues to be represented by the center-periphery approach. Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East are the recipient end of the dominant misrepresentation.
Africa, in particular, Muslim Africa that combines African-ness, black/brownness, and Islam, largely color knowledge production in international affairs. According to professor Mohamedou’s assessment of international knowledge production, media representation, and policy pronouncements, especially in post-9/11, Africa is portrayed in a dichotomy–either demonized or romanticized. Africa also remains a destination and intellectual place of commodification derivative of this long-standing domination.
Professor Mohamedou framed religion and non-state actors by “Afro-Islamic pessimism,” which the global media described as an implication of chaos, instability, and disorder. He focuses on the non-state actors, particularly religious armed groups, which became formidable agents of transformation in Africa. Professor Mohamedou argued that religious forces had been there since the 19th century as a contending force in the decolonization movements, and it seems that they remain to be salient. In many parts of Africa, the exhaustion of the nationalist narratives and the post-colonial states’ failure to keep their promises after the 1970s, brought about an easy comeback of religious forces that were steadily on the rise. However, according to the index shared by professor Mohamedou, the resurgence of religion was also part of the global religious and political phenomenon in the last few decades. He also analyzed the dynamics of global politics: interventionism in the 1990s, securitization in the 2000s, and neo-authoritarianism in the 2010s, resulting in the emergence and rising of non-state actors, both transnational and local. Besides, the weakening of the African states was caused by the emasculation of African states by Western economic corporations and international organizations.
He identified three important stages to map out the trajectories in which non-state actors evolved from political to religious: borrowing religious rhetoric from Islamic movements, seeking the alliances of those religious movements, and finally making religion their primary base. He used the Algerian Salivation Front (FIS) case to demonstrate those stages.
The non-state actors, whether the Islamic or non-Islamic armed groups and civil society organizations—the latter contributing more positively than the former, could be seen as precursors of the transformation of Africa in the 21st century as the states are significantly delegitimized. Emboldened by the current changes rooted in the synthesis of a legitimacy crisis, the disintegration of social systems, and the rise of disruptive military innovations, non-state armed groups are evolving to be the architects that force the necessary paradigm shift. Moreover, the weakening African states seem to be adopting the action and language of the non-state actors—the growing trend of hiring foreign non-state military contractors by African states, was mentioned as an illustration. Transnational, militarized, and hybridized in nature, the non-state actors, as professor Mohamedou concluded, are here to stay, having equally deep historical anchoring and forward-looking dynamic; thus, they should not be dealt as crises that could be eradicated.
Recap written by Yekatit G. Tsehayu