The Rise of Militarisation: Conflict and Crisis of the Political Settlement in Algeria and the Sahel

The current Sahel conflicts, a compound of Jihadist war in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, and Tuareg rebellion in Mali, have a genealogy that traces their efficient causes to two north African countries, Algeria and Libya. The efficient cause of Aristotelian parlance is the one through which the connection between the origin of a phenomenon and the forms it takes are established: thus, in this case, while the origin of the Sahel conflicts is rooted in unresolved issues within Sahelian countries, they would not have broken out the way they did without factors involving Algeria and Libya. This is well known in the case of Libya, since the Tuareg armed groups who started the separatist rebellion that set off the troubles in early 2012 had returned to Mali from their pampered expatriation in Libya. Libya under Col. Kaddafi had a Sahel policy, which included helping to stabilise that region by restraining separatist Tuareg militants; and by funding Sufi Islam, considered a check to Salafi Islam—the one embraced by Islamist activists in the Sahel, even before the current Jihadist conflict. The collapse of Kaddafi’s regime, at the hand of Western-supported insurrectionists, put an end to that policy, and the shock in the Sahel, namely in Mali, was as immediate as floods rushing in once the floodgates have been removed.

The role of Algeria is less well known, and yet the Sahel conflicts are a direct consequence of the Algerian conflict that began in 1992 and lasted into the mid-2010s, after abating considerably in the late 2000s. More than being just a consequence, the Sahel conflicts have replicated some of the dynamics of the Algerian one, often through a direct transfer of the outlook and methods of Algeria’s Islamist militants to their Sahelian (Malian) comrades. And there are parallels, as well as significant dissimilarities, in the trajectories of Algeria and the Sahel as they have confronted and continue to confront the problem.

In order to make all of this plain, this paper develops two arguments: first, the Algerian conflict derives from a crisis in the Algerian political settlement which its leadership tried resolving through democratisation in 1988-92. The solution failed and instead plunged the country into years of conflict and a consolidation of militarised governance—an outcome that plays a central role in Algeria’s sclerotic foreign policy, including as regard the Sahel. Second, the form which the Sahel conflicts have taken derives from the Algerian conflict and this, in turn, has led to a breakdown of the Sahel’s democratic political settlement, with the apparent end of democratisation and rise of militarised governance in the region.

To present these two arguments, the paper supplies an in-depth exploration of the crisis of the Algerian political settlement through a methodology of historical analysis—i.e., tracing its defining elements from their point of origin to their current manifestations through the critical juncture, i.e., 1988-1992, mentioned above; and it evaluates the developing situation in the Sahel through a framework of analysis drawn from the Algerian experience—before drawing some conclusions.