Description
Since the Islamist insurgency in the Sahel region spread to Burkina Faso in 2015, several self-defense groups have emerged or evolved to counter the insurgency. Three groups of note, the Koglweogo Movement, the Dozo Hunters, and the VDP, contribute the most to the counterinsurgency efforts of the state. The Koglweogo Movement and the Dozo Hunters already existed to provide varying security functions to their communities in the absence of state structures and evolved to engage in counterinsurgency. The VDP was created by the government as a force multiplier in the government's counterinsurgency struggle. This research, through the state-society linkages of militias in Burkina Faso, will explore why these groups target civilians during counterinsurgency. My initial findings indicate that militias in Burkina Faso use counterinsurgency activities as an excuse to execute long-running ethnic conflicts. As a result, while some of the militias selectively target civilians belonging to their communities with less lethal violence, they also selectively target civilians of other ethnic groups, with accusations of collaborating with the Islamist insurgents, to commit more lethal violence like massacres against them. This is especially evident in the relationship between the VDP/Koglweogo Movement (both mainly made up of the Moosi people) and the Fulani people. Using the state-society linkages of militias in Burkina Faso as an analytical framework, I will present which groups are more likely to target civilians in this manner, and why.
