Mistaking Order for Anarchy: Territory, Mobility, and Security in the Sahel

International stabilization interventions in so-called fragile states have failed everywhere they have been tried. In the Sahel, US, French, and United Nations-led missions were recently expelled following a series of military coups d’états. They left conditions of even greater instability than when they were deployed over a decade earlier. Casey McNeill takes these failures as a jumping off point to rethink the spatial logics and imaginaries that ground diagnoses of fragile states and interventions to stabilize them. These have been premised on the assumption that territorial governance is a necessary foundation for global security. McNeill historicizes and politicizes this assumption, showing how the modern equation of security with territorial control has displaced a diversity of approaches to ordering and securing collective life. This book models alternative, non-territorial practices of political order and collective security that are highly relevant to rethinking security more broadly, in the Sahel and beyond.

Casey McNeill is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Fordham University.