On June 24, 2026, traffic resumed on the strategic Bamako–Mourdiah–Nara axis in central-western Mali after weeks of blockade imposed by the JNIM (Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin). More significant than the reopening itself is how it happened: not through a decisive military operation by the state, but following mediation by local dignitaries and community actors with the jihadist group.
This episode alone invites a rethinking of conflict dynamics in the Sahel. It suggests that the conflict is no longer just a series of offensives, retreats, or territorial conquests. It now plays out in the ability to open or close a road, ensure trade continuity, influence mobility, or condition everyday collective life. The center of gravity of the competition appears to be shifting. The question may no longer be who controls a territory, but who actually exercises the functions that allow a society to operate—and thereby produces authority. This hypothesis frames the following analysis of recent JNIM strategy and broader transformations of war and authority-making in the Sahelian margins.
I. From territorial conquest to functional conquest
What is changing in the Sahel today may not only be the geography of war but its very object. Competition now focuses less on durable territorial control and more on controlling the functions that make a society work. This shift demands a new perspective: from spaces to flows, from territories to functions, from military conquest to the production of order.
Developments in Mali since 2024 illustrate this mutation. Without giving up attacks on armed forces, JNIM has progressively added to its repertoire road blockades, movement restrictions, supply interdictions, control of trade routes, and pressure on key corridors linking Bamako to Kayes, Nioro-du-Sahel, Ségou, and Mourdiah. These operations produce effects far beyond the military: they hit supply chains, markets, people’s mobility, economic activities, and ordinary conditions of collective life.
This change reflects a strategic shift. For a long time, war in the Sahel was understood through a cartography of controlled territories, conquered localities, or lost and regained military positions. That reading remains relevant but insufficient to grasp current transformations. JNIM is now pushing further a logic seen in several contemporary insurgencies: functional control gradually becomes as important as spatial control.
A state exists not only because it exercises sovereignty over territory. It also exists because it performs a set of functions that populations consider essential: securing travel, ensuring trade continuity, protecting supply routes, delivering justice, arbitrating conflicts, organizing taxation, and enforcing common rules. When those functions become the main object of competition, the nature of conflict changes. The question is no longer just who controls territory, but who can ensure its functioning.
It is precisely on this terrain that JNIM seems to shift the confrontation. The movement does not necessarily seek to directly administer the territories where it is present. Instead, it appears to invest in the functions that make the state socially indispensable, while leaving the costs of daily administration to the state. I call this process 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 populations, ground the concrete utility of the state. Roads are perhaps the most visible expression of this transformation. They cease to be mere transport infrastructure and become political institutions. Closing them, reopening them, filtering goods, taxing commercial flows, or conditioning population mobility amounts to exercising prerogatives traditionally associated with public authority. From this perspective, controlling a road is not just about controlling space; it is about controlling the economic and social interactions that cross that space.
This shift from territorial control to control of flows is, in my view, one of the most significant strategic mutations of the war in the Sahel. The real question may no longer be who occupies territories, but who controls the functions that give meaning to those territories. Because when functions change hands before territories do, the very nature of the conflict is transformed.
II. When the state ceases to be the sole producer of authority
This transformation also illuminates the role of communities. Their intervention in lifting the blockade does not necessarily mean support for JNIM’s political project. Rather, it reflects the constraints faced by populations whose survival depends on road reopening, market access, and trade continuity. In these circumstances, negotiation is less a political preference than a survival rationality. However, it would be wrong to see these communities as a homogeneous bloc. Traders, transporters, customary chiefs, religious authorities, herders, and rural youth have different interests and relationships with armed groups. These divergences precisely make communities permanent spaces of negotiation, compromise, and tension around the production of local order.
This reality also invites a rethinking of state-making. Since Max Weber, the modern state is conceived as a form of political organization capable of institutionalizing authority through a rational-legal order. Its legitimacy rests on impersonal rules, bureaucracy, and the monopoly of legitimate physical violence. However, Weberian analysis also reminds us that all domination is embedded in a plurality of legitimacy registers, where rational-legal, traditional, and charismatic forms can coexist, compete, or reinforce each other.
Sahelian spaces precisely illustrate this interweaving. State authority constantly interacts with traditional legitimacies embodied by customary chiefs, religious authorities, and local notables, as well as with a legitimacy that JNIM progressively seeks to build. This legitimacy does not rest primarily on the personal charisma of its leaders. Rather, it derives from its capacity to produce concrete order, quickly arbitrate disputes, secure certain circulation axes, regulate markets, or sanction behaviors it deems deviant. This is not, strictly speaking, charismatic authority in Weber’s sense. JNIM tends to build what could be called performative legitimacy: a legitimacy that comes neither from institutional status, nor traditional heritage, nor exclusively from a leader’s prestige, but from the repeated demonstration of its ability to exercise functions that populations normally associate with the state. The lifting of the Mourdiah and Nara blockade thus illustrates a configuration where these different forms of authority do not substitute for each other; they coexist, compete, and sometimes articulate. The state retains its institutional legality; traditional authorities mobilize their social capital to preserve local balances; while JNIM seeks to convert its coercive capacity into a capacity to govern.
I would go further. What JNIM seems to pursue is not so much the immediate conquest of the state apparatus as its progressive functional dispossession, especially in territorial margins where state presence remains intermittent. By investing in the concrete functions that structure daily life—securing movement, arbitrating conflicts, regulating exchange, or organizing access to resources—it does not replace the state; it gradually shifts the state’s center of gravity. The stake is no longer to occupy central power institutions, but to transfer, in the peripheries, the functions that underpin political authority. The state remains legally sovereign, but risks losing what constitutes, in Weberian terms, the core of its practical legitimacy: the recognized capacity to durably produce collective order where populations live. Before challenging the monopoly of legitimate violence, JNIM seems primarily to seek a socially recognized capacity to produce authority in spaces where the state has become intermittent.
Conclusion
In this sense, the real issue may no longer be whether JNIM can build a parallel state, but whether it is gradually reconfiguring the social conditions of authority production. State-making does not only proceed from constitutions, institutions, or coercive capacities; it also results from the daily recognition of whoever guarantees security, organizes exchanges, arbitrates conflicts, and makes collective life predictable. Every successful mediation, every road reopened, every dispute resolved outside public institutions contributes, even unintentionally, to shifting the boundaries of political legitimacy.
From this perspective, the main challenge for Sahelian states is likely not only the military reconquest of territories. It is above all to become, in the eyes of populations, the most credible actor to ensure security, deliver justice, guarantee mobility, and produce predictable order. The decisive battle unfolding today in the Sahel may not primarily pit two forces seeking to control territory. It pits two competing claims to become, in the eyes of populations, the actor capable of durably organizing collective life. In other words, the conflict is less about the monopoly of violence than about the socially recognized capacity to produce authority.
