‘Speak of the devil and he shall appear’: unpacking the practices of security brokers in West Africa

ABSTRACT

This study investigates the intermediaries or brokers who participate in the constitution, negotiation, and production of peace and security policies in West Africa. These security brokers possess social and knowledge capital, making them the preferred interlocutors of international actors, institutions, and researchers to produce security knowledge to inform policy. Thus, this article seeks to explain how these security brokers interact with and shape the construction of a security assemblage in West Africa. Based on three ethnographic sites in Bamako (Mali), Niamey (Niger) and Abidjan (Ivory Coast), social trajectories of these intermediaries of securitization processes allow us to understand how material and symbolic resources are attracted. Security brokers oscillate between instrumentalist, pragmatic, and reflexive stances toward the (re)production of security practices promoted by (trans)national institutions and actors. Just like any international institutions or actors, they can either participate to the (re)production or challenge the premise of the security assemblage.

KEYWORDS:

• Securitization
• political ethnography
• knowledge production
• West Africa
• security brokers

Acknowledgements

A preliminary version of this article was presented by Maxime Ricard at the International Studies Association (ISA) Annual Convention in 2018. We thank the discussant and participants of the panel for their respective analyses and comments on this first draft. Adib Bencherif also presented an updated version of this work in 2022 in a workshop of the Réseau d’Analyse Stratégique (RAS). We thank the colleagues in the room for their comments, notably Marie-Eve Desrosiers. Finally, we also want to thank Dr. Leonardo Villalón and other colleagues from the Sahel Research Group for stimulating discussions between 2019 and 2021, which help polish this paper. We also thank Bruno Charbonneau, Cédric Jourde, Marie-Joelle Zahar, Lydie Belporo, David Morin, Rita Abrahamsen, and Gino Vlavonou for regularly sharing their thoughts with us on this issue.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The word was not really used at the time. The word safety or sûreté was much more popular.

2 Some of them are, however, obtaining or looking for degrees in resolution of conflict or international security to try to increase their legitimacy.

3 We are mindful of avoiding a teleological understanding of war and peace, symbolized by the problematic term “post-conflict”.

4 Numerous informal talks with members of the Centre Francopaix and the Sahel Research Group between 2016 and 2021.

5 This analysis is based on informal talks, observations in Chatham House events, academic conferences gathering Sahelian scholars between 2016 and 2022.

6 Quotes are translated from French in the text.

7 We keep the name of the NGO anonymous.

8 Ivorian nationals was the third nationality in numbers of asylum seekers in France during our research.

9 One of the most famous Africanist scholars, Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan alerted few times about the issues associated to the production of knowledge on Africa with the consulting in the aid industry, determined by political agenda, see for example Olivier de Sardan, 2011.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council ofCanada under the Doctoral Grant [767 2015 1494] and and the Postdoctoral Fellowship [756 2019 0594].

Notes on contributors

Adib Bencherif

Adib Bencherif is an Assistant Professor at the School of Applied Politics of the University of Sherbrooke. He served as a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Sahel Research Group at the University of Florida (2019-2021). He is a research associate at the Sahel Research Group, as well as at the UNESCO-PREV Chair and at the Centre Francopaix of the Chaire Raoul-Dandurand at UQAM. He is also visiting scholar at the Montreal Centre for International Studies (CÉRIUM). His main research interests focus on security issues, politics of identity, and political violence in North Africa and the Sahel. His research focuses on nomadic communities, specifically the Tuareg. He has published numerous scientific articles in French and English and co-edited a book on political risk analysis (2021).

Maxime Ricard

Maxime Ricard is West Africa researcher at the Institute for Strategic Research of the Military School (IRSEM, Paris). He holds a PhD in political science (2020) from the University of Quebec in Montreal (UQAM) and was coordinator of the Centre FrancoPaix in conflict resolution and peace missions of the Raoul-Dandurand Chair at UQAM from 2016 to 2021. Before joining academic research, he worked for two years in the field of conflict resolution in Ivory Coast. His thesis research focused on order-making in post-conflict Ivory Coast. He recently co-edited the Routledge Handbook of African Peacebuilding (2022).