Description
Since their independence, countries have deployed various practices to ensure full control of their territory to limit breaches of their national integrity and sovereignty originating from within. How do states respond to such breaches in the broader context of ethnic rebellions with a separatist agenda? The goal is to understand why state efforts to eradicate ethnic contention have failed, including after a foreign military intervention. I argue that groups likely to succeed in resisting or breaking up with their central state are those that manage to self-govern, exploit ties with their diaspora (including refugees in contiguous states) and transnational advocacy networks, and lobby for support from foreign states. Specifically, through the analysis of the Tuareg group in Mali, I show that elements of autonomous governance, such as a robust informal economy, facilitate political control and support among the population, which results in an internal security dilemma for the central state. Tacitly, the paper tackles the mandates of the French military interventions in Mali since 2012 and addresses how the colonial legacy and ties built between the former colonial empire and the Tuareg group affected the outcome of such interventions on the ongoing conflict.
