Description
From so-called fanatics in the Indian subcontinent to Jihadists in contemporary politics, states have often devised various means to address threats to their existence, interests, or self. Radicalization and violent extremism have become increasingly useful concepts that underlie policy instruments – Countering Violent Extremism – for states to manage and govern ‘problematic’ ideas and populations which pose threats or risk. This paper addresses these dynamics within the Sahel and Lake Chad Basin (LCB) where growing threats and risks to individuals and communities have been persistent but where ‘extremism’ has been selectively adopted in labeling these groups even in situations where violence is acknowledged as a constant or where there is ‘extremism’ without violence. This paper argues that the discourse of ‘violent extremism’ encounters complex forms of resistance and resilience in the Sahel and LCB. The first challenge emerges from contentious biographical narratives where attempts to produce stable national selves in overlapping sovereign terrains with transborder communities with historical biographies that sometimes may challenge statist narratives or even population-centric biopolitical ones such as those deployed by Europe and other Western entities to govern migration ‘upstream’, thus further complicating the politics of violent extremism in the subcontinent. Thus, contrary to the societal access and control which counter-radicalization and CVE could offer, adopting similar discourse within the Sahel and LCB is fraught with unexpected, localized challenges.
