On 24 June 2026, traffic resumed on the strategic axis linking Bamako to Mourdiah and Nara in central-western Mali, after weeks of blockade imposed by JNIM (Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin). More than the reopening of this road, it is the manner in which it happened that draws attention. According to available information, the return to circulation was not achieved through a decisive military operation by the state, but through mediations led by local dignitaries and community actors with the jihadist group.

This episode alone invites a reconsideration of certain analytical frameworks for the Sahelian conflict. It suggests that the dynamics of the conflict no longer boil down to a succession of offensives, retreats or territorial conquests. They also play out in the ability to open or close a road axis, guarantee the continuity of exchanges, influence mobilities, or condition the ordinary functioning of collective life. In other words, the center of gravity of the competition seems to be gradually shifting. Therefore, the question may no longer be only about who controls a territory, but rather who exercises (concretely) the functions that allow a society to function and, in doing so, produces authority. Starting from this hypothesis, I propose to reread recent developments in JNIM’s strategy and, more broadly, the transformations of war and the production of authority in the Sahelian margins.

From territorial conquest to functional conquest

What is changing today in the Sahel is perhaps not only the geography of war; it is its object. The competition seems to focus less and less on the durable conquest of territories and more and more on the control of functions that allow a society to function. This evolution is far from trivial. It invites us to shift our gaze: from spaces to flows, from territories to functions, from military conquest to the production of order.

Developments observed in Mali since 2024 illustrate this mutation. Without renouncing attacks on armed forces, JNIM has gradually integrated into its repertoire of action road blockades, circulation restrictions, supply interdictions, controls on commercial axes, and pressures on the main corridors linking Bamako to Kayes, Nioro-du-Sahel, Ségou, or even Mourdiah. These operations produce effects that go well beyond the military dimension. They affect supply circuits, market functioning, people’s mobility, economic activities, and more broadly, the ordinary conditions of collective life.

This evolution reflects a strategic shift. For a long time, war in the Sahel was understood through a cartography of controlled territories, conquered localities, or military positions lost and retaken. This reading remains relevant, but it becomes insufficient to understand the current transformations of the conflict. JNIM is now pushing further a logic found in several contemporary forms of insurgency: control of functions gradually becomes as important as control of spaces.

A state does not exist only because it exercises sovereignty over a territory. It also exists because it fulfills a set of functions that populations consider essential: securing movements, guaranteeing the continuity of exchanges, protecting supply circuits, rendering justice, arbitrating conflicts, organizing taxation, and enforcing common rules. When these functions themselves become the main object of competition, the nature of the conflict transforms. The question is no longer only who controls a territory, but who is able to ensure its functioning.

It is precisely on this terrain that JNIM appears to be shifting the confrontation. The movement does not necessarily seek to directly administer the territories where it is established. It seems instead to invest in the functions that make the state socially indispensable, while leaving the state the costs of daily administration. I call this process a functional capture of the state: a strategy by which an armed actor seeks less to exercise complete territorial sovereignty than to appropriate the functions that, in the eyes of populations, found the concrete utility of the state. Roads constitute perhaps the most visible expression of this transformation. They cease to be simple transport infrastructures to become real political institutions. Closing them, reopening them, filtering goods, taxing trade flows, or conditioning the mobility of populations amounts to exercising prerogatives traditionally associated with public authority. In this perspective, controlling a road is no longer just about controlling a space; it is about controlling the economic and social interactions that cross that space.

This shift from control of territories to control of flows constitutes, in my view, one of the most significant strategic mutations of the war in the Sahel. The real question may therefore no longer be who occupies the territories, but who controls the functions that give meaning to those territories. Because when functions change hands before territories, the very nature of the conflict transforms.

When the state ceases to be the sole producer of authority

This transformation also sheds light on the role of communities. Their intervention in lifting the blockade does not necessarily signify adherence to JNIM’s political project. It mainly reflects the constraints faced by populations whose survival conditions depend on road reopening, market access, and continuity of exchanges. In these circumstances, negotiation is less a political preference than a rationality of survival. However, it would be erroneous to consider these communities as a homogeneous bloc. Traders, transporters, customary chiefs, religious authorities, herders, or rural youth do not share the same interests nor the same relationships with armed groups. It is precisely these divergences that make communities permanent spaces of negotiation, compromise, but also tensions around the production of local order.

This reality also invites a rethinking of the making of the state. Since Max Weber, the modern state is thought of as a form of political organization capable of institutionalizing authority through a rational-legal order. Its legitimacy rests on the impersonality of rules, bureaucracy, and the monopoly of legitimate physical violence. However, Weberian analysis also reminds us that all domination is inscribed in a plurality of registers of legitimacy, where rational-legal, traditional, and charismatic forms can coexist, compete, or reinforce each other.

Sahelian spaces precisely illustrate this interweaving. The authority of the state constantly interacts there with traditional legitimacies, embodied by customary chiefs, religious authorities, and local notables, but also with a legitimacy that JNIM seeks to gradually build. This does not primarily rest on the personal charisma of its leaders. It proceeds more from its capacity to produce concrete order, to quickly arbitrate disputes, to secure certain circulation axes, to regulate markets, or to sanction behavior it deems deviant. It is not, strictly speaking, a charismatic authority in Weber’s sense. JNIM tends rather to build what could be called performative legitimacy: a legitimacy that stems neither from institutional status, nor from a traditional heritage, nor exclusively from the prestige of a leader, but from the repeated demonstration of its capacity to exercise certain functions that populations usually associate with the state. The lifting of the Mourdiah and Nara blockade thus illustrates a configuration where these different forms of authority do not substitute for each other; they coexist, compete, and sometimes articulate. The state retains its institutional legality; traditional authorities mobilize their social capital to preserve local equilibria; while JNIM seeks to convert its coercive capacity into governing capacity.

I would go even further. What JNIM seems to be seeking is not so much the immediate conquest of the state apparatus as its gradual functional disenfranchisement, particularly in territorial margins where state presence remains discontinuous. By investing in the concrete functions that structure the daily life of populations—securing movements, arbitrating conflicts, regulating exchanges, or organizing access to resources—it does not replace the state; it gradually displaces its center of gravity. The stake is no longer to occupy the institutions of central power, but to transfer, in the peripheries, the functions that underpin political authority. The state remains legally sovereign, but it risks losing what constitutes, in the Weberian sense, the heart of its practical legitimacy: the recognized capacity to durably produce collective order where populations live. Before contesting the monopoly of legitimate violence, it seems to me that JNIM seeks above all to acquire a socially recognized capacity to produce authority in spaces where the state has become intermittent.

Conclusion

In this sense, the real stake may no longer be whether JNIM is capable of building a parallel state, but whether it gradually succeeds in reconfiguring the social conditions of production of authority. The making of the state does not proceed solely from constitutions, institutions, or coercive capacities; it also results from the daily recognition of the one who guarantees security, organizes exchanges, arbitrates conflicts, and makes collective life predictable. Every successful mediation, every reopened road, every dispute settled outside public institutions contributes, even unintentionally, to shifting the boundaries of political legitimacy.

From this perspective, the main challenge for Sahelian states is likely not only the military reconquest of territories. It consists above all in becoming again, in the eyes of populations, the most credible actor to ensure security, render justice, guarantee mobility, and produce predictable order. The decisive battle playing out today in the Sahel may not primarily oppose two forces seeking to control a territory. It opposes two competing claims to become, in the eyes of populations, the actor capable of durably organizing collective life. In other words, the conflict is less about the monopoly of violence than about the socially recognized capacity to produce authority.