What Mali’s recent past reveals about its present woes, Part 1: The road to nongovernmentality
These days the sovereignty of the Malian state looks more hypothetical than ever. The government’s control over its northern regions ranges from tenuous to nonexistent. Kidal has been firmly under the rule of Tuareg separatists for two years, while only the presence of French and UN troops prevents Gao and Timbuktu from falling back into the hands of the jihadists who occupied them for most of 2012. In Bamako, the treasury is heavily dependent on foreign aid, and public spending is subject to audits by the International Monetary Fund.
To consider how the Malian nation-building project reached this juncture, some Empire to NGOs coverobservers might look back to previous, and ultimately unsuccessful, peace accords signed between the Malian government and northern rebels in 1992 and 2006. Others might look back to the strictures of neoliberalism that cut state budgets and sapped public faith in the Malian state from the 1980s. Historian Gregory Mann, in his new book From Empires to NGOs in the West African Sahel, looks back even further, to the very origins of the region’s postcolonial states in the early 1960s. (...)
▻http://bridgesfrombamako.com/2015/03/18/what-malis-recent-past-reveals-about-its-present-woes-part-1-the-
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