Description
This article examines Niger’s negotiation of a counterterrorism strategy between 2011 and 2023 that positioned it as a key ally of the West and enmeshed it in the Global War on Terror. The counterterrorism strategy included kinetic and non-kinetic approaches in collaboration with a range of Western partners. It was justified by a set of discourses, used by both Nigerien elites and Western policy makers, that were founded on an essentialist view of the Nigerien state as weak and absent from regions most affected by jihadist groups. These discourses were ultimately rejected by Niger’s security forces and the population in the 2023 coup. We trace how counter-insurgency doctrine became a form of politics in and of itself in Niger (Charbonneau, 2021) by dissecting and identifying the competing national and international interests shaping Niger’s counterterrorism strategy.
