National and Transnational Actors Reshaping (in)Security Dynamics across MENA and the Sahara-Sahel

Abstract

This panel provides a number of historically rich and theoretically informed reflections on how in different Arab and African countries security and insecurity dynamics have proceeded in counter-intuitive ways: there are cases in which the role of external actors supposedly contributing to the country’s security and political stabilization has reinforced the fragmentation of authority (e.g. Mali), to cases in which external non-state actors enter a conflict for achieving domestic purposes, ending up reinforcing the state and the inter-state status quo (e.g. Hizbullah in Syria). Through different empirical analyses, this panel aims at re-locating agency within the army and other security forces or armed groups, providing more nuanced and critical accounts of Arab and African states beyond mainstream readings grounded in weberian conceptions readings. This focus is warranted not just at an empirical level, given the pivotal role these actors have played since 2011, but on an analytical level too: state security forces are the symbolic and factual repositories of statehood as they embody the state to its population on a daily basis, and any fragmentation, successful interference in their operations or delegation of political violence to other bodies, forces us to rethink the usefulness of classic weberian conceptions of authority. Namely, the panel aims at offering new insights deriving from both Arab and African countries enabling to further problematize the literature on statehood and sovereignty, even in a key issue area as security governance. We take issue with two main conceptual categories: on the one hand, an idealized Westphalian state, with distinct boundaries and borders’ inviolability – something increasingly violated across the globe and in various ways in the MENA-Sahara-Sahel region; on the other hand, with a Weberian-induced expectation of the monopoly over the threat or use of violence by the state and its ability to autonomously carry out security-related tasks. Across the different papers included in the panel, we ultimately wish to emphasize the insecurity dynamics that are traceable at both the domestic and the regional level, and the intermingling between state and non-state actors, be they national or transnational, within a critically revised Principal-Agent framework. Most papers will illustrate a dynamic of insecuritisation, be it intentional or an unintentional consequence, both from the local to the regional level and from outside to inside, capitalising on the state’s far from perfectly Weberian control of the territory.