Ibrahim Yahaya Ibrahim’s (PhD candidate, Political Science) dissertation research focuses on political contestation and Islamic discourse in the Sahel region. It addresses the questions of why and how have political contestations on behalf of Islam proliferated in the Muslim world? And why have these contestations taken different forms: jihadist insurgencies, violent riots, and peaceful protests?
The dissertation will address these questions by focusing on specific episodes of political contestations in Muslim majority countries of the Sahelian region of West Africa. More specifically, the research focuses on three cases: the jihadist insurgency by the Movement of Oneness and Jihad in West Africa (MOJWA) in Gao/Mali, the anti-Charlie Hebdo riots in Zinder/Niger and the anti-slavery protests in Nouakchott by the Initiative for the Resurgence of the Abolitionist Movement (IRA-Mauritania). These cases provide a representative sample of the contentious issues as well as the varied form of collective actions that are at play in the Sahel region.
Over the course of the summer 2015 and the spring and summer of 2016, Ibrahim conducted extensive field research in each of Mali, Mauritania, and Niger where he interviewed a variety of actors, including political elites, civil society activists, jihadists, scholars, military officers, etc. He conducted archival research, focus groups, and participant observations as well. In addition to these qualitative data, Ibrahim also collected other quantitative data from different sources, including Afrobarometer, Freedom House, Armed Conflict Location and Events Data Project (ACLED), Global Terrorism Dataset (GTD).
The argument that will emerge from this research will help to understand the way in which macro level factors—such the state and society dynamics—interact with factors at meso level—such as group’s ideology—and micro level factors—individual’s identity, to explain the emergence and varied forms of Islamic political contestation.
Ibrahim Yahaya Ibrahim is a PhD candidate in political science and a research associate with the Sahel Research Group. Funding for his research is provided by the Minerva Research Initiative.