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Farmer-herder conflicts have been long standing in Mali's rural areas. It has been shown that it is mostly herders who support and join jihadist groups. By analysing land regimes in farmer-herder contexts and merging studies on different scales of violence, the paper investigates how local dynamics interact with national political violence. It argues that historical precedents and pastoralist grievances related to land governance have created a fertile breeding ground for jihadism to take root and spread. It also contends that local land-related issues can have a considerable impact on state fragility and the eruption and dynamics of violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates ruling parties' calculations in wartime legislative elections. The paper argues that ruling parties' strategies are shaped by opportunity structures and the party's desire to protect party insiders, rather than simply by considerations about 'government-held' or 'rebel-held' territory. Ruling parties may adopt several strategies: (1) ceding seats to popular opposition candidates, even in government-controlled territory; (2) allowing rebels to run on the ruling party's ticket; and (3) blatant electoral manipulation. Ruling parties may miscalculate, including about how much manipulation the population will countenance. The paper examines these dynamics through a case study of Mali's 2020 legislative elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on recent research in peace studies in order to analyse peacebuilding efforts with jihadists in central Mali. The paper explores two main streams of data: first, an exchange of messages between a Malian jihadist leader, Amadou Kouffa, and a Malian Muslim cleric; and, second, survey data on Malians' attitudes towards politics and Islamic law. The paper also discusses what is known about a pattern of fragile, temporary, localised ceasefires with Malian jihadists. These different data sources highlight the poor fit between Western liberal peacemaking frameworks and some local conflict realities and aspirations, even amid a supposed 'local turn' in peacebuilding. Whereas liberal frameworks tend to assume that democracy, human rights, reconciliation, and secularism should be part of any peace settlement, some Malian elites and citizens appear open to illiberal solutions. These findings indicate substantial conceptual and practical challenges for the incorporation of local voices into peacebuilding agendas. The findings also add to an emerging literature on 'illiberal peace', which so far has focused mostly on top-down authoritarian models rather than civil society-driven illiberal compromise efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To avoid negative societal implications from water management actions, the complex interrelations between water and conflict need to be understood. Assessment of such links in complex adaptive systems, characterized by various factors which mutually influence each other, is challenging. This paper explores how the use of participatory methods can support the identification of water-related conflict risks in one such complex adaptive system: the Inner Niger Delta in Mali. We find that participatory analysis not only facilitated the identification of systemic risks in a complex adaptive system, but also shapes the perceptions of these interlinkages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While often caused by conflict, crises are treated by the EU as a phenomenon of their own. Contemporary EU crisis management represents a watering down of normative EU approaches to peacebuilding, reduced to a technical exercise with the limited ambition to contain spillover effects of crises. In theoretical terms this is a reversal, which tilts intervention towards EU security interests and avoids engagement with the root causes of the crises. This paper develops a novel crisis response typology derived from conflict theory, which ranges from crisis management to crisis resolution and (critical) crisis transformation. By drawing on EU interventions in Libya, Mali and Ukraine, the paper demonstrates that basic crisis management approaches are pre-eminent in practice. More promising innovations remain largely confined to the realms of discourse and policy documentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global narratives underscore that economic growth can often coincide with reductions in poverty and inequality. However, the experiences of several countries over recent decades confirm that inequality can widen or narrow in response to policy choices and independent of economic growth. This paper analyses five country cases, Brazil, Cambodia, Mali, Peru and Tanzania. These countries are the most successful in reducing inequality and poverty while growing robustly for at least a decade since the early 2000 s. The paper assesses how good macroeconomic management, sectoral reform, the strengthening of safety nets, responses to external shocks, and initial conditions all chip away at inequality and support broad growth. Sustained and robust economic growth with strong poverty and inequality reductions are possible across very different contexts and policy choices. The comparative analysis also identifies common building blocks toward success and warns that hard-earned achievements can be easily overturned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many previous studies highlight that the supply elasticity of agricultural products is not always symmetric. Indeed, the main finding from the literature is that the supply of agricultural products responds more to rising prices than falling prices. However, in the context of Mali, producers seem to be particularly more sensitive to price falls and prefer to grow other crops such as maize. In this paper, we test whether the supply elasticity of cotton in Mali is asymmetric or not, and if so, characterizes the nature of the asymmetry. We apply a nonlinear Autoregressive Distributed Lag approach to the Nerlove model. Our results show that the supply elasticity of cotton is symmetric in the short-run and asymmetric in the long-run, and that cotton supply responds more to price falls than price rises in the long-run. The key finding is a paradox in the opposite direction of the asymmetry found in the literature. In the context of falling price, producers are more flexible in substituting another competitive crop for cotton, while in the case of rising prices, producers deal with insufficient access to credit and acreage, poor quality of soil and lack of equipment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many countries have adopted integrated community case management (iCCM) to reduce mortality among children under five years from common childhood illnesses. The 2016–2020 Malian Red Cross iCCM program trained 441 Community Health Workers (CHWs) to treat malaria, pneumonia, diarrhea, and malnutrition for children under five years of age in six districts. Implementation strength and quality of care (QoC) were assessed through the program's supervision function, using the Malian Ministry of Health's system. This paper compares methods and results of program supervision data and an independent evaluation to assess the effectiveness of program implementation and supervision and inform program improvement. It also presents the benefits and limitations of each method. An independent QoC evaluation was conducted using tools developed by the Real Accountability: Data Analysis for Results (RADAR) project, hereafter referred to as the RADAR evaluation. RADAR evaluation data collected in July and August 2018 were compared with program supervision data collected mostly between May and December 2018. The RADAR evaluation provided detailed findings on correct assessment, classification, and treatment per illness, medication type, and dosage. Program supervision combined the findings for all illnesses, medication type, and dosage due to limitations in the data collection process. Six indicators were comparable between both methods. Findings were similar for temperature and mid-upper arm circumference measurements but diverged between program supervision and the RADAR evaluation, respectively, on correct classification for all illnesses (87.1% vs. 65.3%), correct treatment for all illnesses (69.5% vs. 39.8%), correct respiratory rate counting (88.5% vs. 54.7%), and administering the first dose by CHW (75.4% vs. 65.0%). Findings from the RADAR evaluation guided improvements in program supervision. A robust program supervision system can serve as a credible method to assess QoC. However, a rigorous independent QoC evaluation provides a valuable benchmark to gauge the effectiveness of the supervisory process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public systems are facing increasingly complex challenges such as poverty and terrorism. In this paper, we seek to demonstrate the theoretical as well as practical value of complexity science, by investigating how key characteristics of a Complex Adaptive System (CAS) work out in practice within the intelligence organization of the ongoing nation-building mission in Mali (MINUSMA). Our main finding is that the learning properties of the CAS suffer when its structural properties are not sufficiently developed. In MINUSMA, major improvements can especially be made in (re)developing the minimum specs – in which strategic and operational demands, ideally, converge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper assesses the relationship between population density and political violence within North and West Africa. We find that while most violence currently occurs in rural areas, it also exhibits a classic distance-decay effect, commonly occurring near urbanized places. Regional differences are evident as Jihadist-led violence is increasingly rural in West Africa while urban violence was more common in North Africa. Important difference in states with major conflict are also present, exemplified by urbanized violence in Nigeria and rural violence in Mali. Our findings therefore provide mixed evidence for the typical "urbanization of conflict" discourse in the literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the impact of armed conflict on the tendency and value of investments in farm inputs. We further investigate whether unconditional cash transfers could stimulate investments in inputs under the context of armed conflict. Using panel data collected in 2014 and 2016 in Mali, we combine the control function approach with the correlated random effect model to address the time-invariant unobserved heterogeneity in non-linear context and the endogeneity problem of conflict variable. We take advantage of the randomized rollout of a national cash transfer program to investigate if there is any differential impact on farm inputs. We find that conflict has a negative and statistically significant impact on the tendency to use and the value of investments on fertilizers, pesticides and machinery. Interestingly, we find a statistically insignificant impact of the cash transfers on farm input investments. From a policy perspective, productive capacities of households cannot be restored by the cash transfers. Rather, a recovery of markets' operations through the re-establishment of security is a more effective policy measure to increase investments in farm inputs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Not so long-ago Burkina Faso was considered an "island" of stability in a conflict-prone part of Africa. This is not the case anymore as armed insurgencies have caused widespread insecurity. While spill-over effects from the conflict in Mali clearly play a role, we argue that the sudden demise of the rule and regime of Blaise Compaoré also is an important contributing factor. To decipher to what extent regime transition shaped the current state of affairs, we show that what kept Burkina Faso stable and out of the conflicts in the region was a "big man deep state" of formal and informal networks of security provisions. When this "deep state" vanished with the ousting of Compaoré and his allies, local security providers have sought new solutions, and this strengthened the role of self-defense militias but also led them to compete against each other, at times also violently. This provided fertile terrain for jihadi insurgents. Therefore, this paper is an attempt to provide a conceptual understanding of how weak rulers actually rule, how some succeed in preserving their rule for a lengthy period of time, and what can happen when they eventually fall. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate the impact of corruption on tax compliance using a sample of 700 small business in Bamako, Mali. The main contribution of this paper is to focus on micro-enterprises (including semi-formal and informal ones), while existing works concentrate on large and formal firms. Our results show that (i) even very small firms pay taxes (two-thirds of firms pay taxes in our sample); and, (ii) paying bribes reduces significantly tax compliance. This latter finding is robust (i) to the addition of a set of control variables accounting for other determinants, (ii) to treatment for endogeneity, and (iii) the use of a different proxy for tax compliance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the proliferation of the internet of things (IoT) and device-to-device (D2D) communications enabled by the boom of mobile computing technology, secure high-speed communication has now become indispensable in our daily life. This is especially true when potentially private data are being continually sensed by and communicated among mobile devices as they exist in a world of interconnected inanimate objects, which is also one of the main themes of the upcoming 5G revolution. As the amount of data to be secured for high-speed communications is vast, there is a need to ensure that the block ciphers used for encryption are deployed without incurring significant computational cost. In this paper, we present fast implementations of recent industry standard block ciphers in typical embedded platforms, consisting of multi-core CPU (ARM A15 and A7) and GPU (Mali T628). We implemented the conventional block cipher (AES) and lightweight block ciphers (CLEFIA, SIMON, SPECK and PRESENT) optimized for fast computation. We also analyze the energy efficiency of these block ciphers computation in CPU and GPU, as low power consumption is crucial for the embedded system. Our experimental results show that the embedded GPU is not only able to compute block ciphers faster than conventional CPU but also consumes significantly less power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Mali, the introduction of 3G alongside growing access to digital audio technologies throughout the 2010s has led a sharp increase in the number of recording studios. Using an ethnography of Bamako studios, we establish a theoretical framework and a methodology to remap music production studies beyond the limits of a Northerncentric narrative. We discuss the notions of high, low and alt tech, and lofi and hifi within the 2010s' recording studio literature. Drawing upon the description of a tradi-trap production, this paper contrasts local discourses and uses of globalized technologies to highlight the constraints and capabilities of studio practitioners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses a unique dataset to analyse the migration dynamics of refugees, returnees and, internally displaced people from the Northern Mali conflict. Individuals were interviewed monthly using mobile phones. Our results cast light on the characteristics of these three groups before and after displacement. In addition, we test how employment and security were related to migration status, as well as the willingness to go back home. Individuals who were employed while displaced were less willing to go back to the North, while those who owned a gun were more likely to plan to go back. Additional indicators of personal safety played a lesser role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Non-governmental organizations play a vital part in the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals as defined by the United Nations. These Goals also include targets related to noncommunicable diseases. However, non-governmental organizations have played a limited role in this area despite such diseases causing the bulk of morbidity and mortality worldwide. Through their activities, non-governmental organizations should aim to strengthen health systems, yet they often only support these for a single disease. Mali, like many other low- and middle-income countries, is facing an increasing burden of diabetes and a health system not adapted to address this challenge. Santé Diabète, a non-governmental organization based in Mali since 2003, has been working specifically on diabetes, and has developed a wide range of activities to improve the national health system. This paper describes changes in the diabetes environment in Mali between 2004 and 2018 based on two health system assessments carried out using a Rapid Assessment Protocol. Over this period, the health system was strengthened with regard to financing and access to medical products. Leadership and governance, service delivery and health workforce were all improved but still partially rely on sustained support from Santé Diabète. The key lesson from this study is that to be effective in changing the management of noncommunicable diseases in a low- and middle-income country, non-governmental organizations need to play a variety of roles, many of which may change over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Proponents of community-based natural resource management often use definitions of community that implicitly, if not explicitly, favor resident forest users over migrant forest users. This paper explores the shortcomings of the ''fixed-in-place'' model of community, using examples from ongoing community-based management projects in Mali. The author then summarizes strategies that these projects are using to expand migrant forest user participation in decisonmaking. The paper ends with a brief discussion of how these experiences in West Africa can enrich community-based natural resource management efforts in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Natural resource conflicts in Mali in the last decade represent an important case to visualise the interconnection between land and climate issues. The country has received significant international attention in recent years both due to the announcement of large-scale land deals and due to its perceived vulnerability to climate stress. At the same time, Malian peasant movements have formed important networks of resistance and have been leading the pilot implementation of village land commissions to recognise and manage community resources, based on a new Agricultural Land Law. This paper explores emerging trends in natural resource politics through the lens of interactions between land and climate policies and discourses. We analyse the growing use of the frame of 'climate security' to associate climate change, conflict and migration in relation to countries such as Mali, by looking into the possibilities that this frame could shift focus and blame towards conflicts between marginalised groups and further close space for bottom-up participation. As an alternative, we explore the relevance of a platform of agrarian climate justice and the possibilities and challenges of enacting some of its principles through the implementation of the village land commissions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

MINUSMA, the UN peace operation in Mali, represents a new development in peace missions, due to the insecure transnational context in which it has evolved and its mandate to collaborate with counterterrorist forces in the region. The goal of this paper is to study this new development, using Enloe's feminist theorization of the concept of militarization. I base my analysis on an understanding of militarization as a social process that can be adapted or contested. Grounded in a qualitative methodology, I study MINUSMA and its peacekeepers in order to identify how the process of militarization takes place within/through the mission. My principal argument is that the context of robust peacekeeping, combined with the implications of collaboration with counterterrorist operations and the reengagement of NATO troop contributing countries, creates a space in which militarization is reinforced for the mission and its peacekeepers and that this impacts how they interact with one another and what practices they favour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a new perspective on the logic of violence of the JNIM in the context of the Malian civil war. After a critical review of the literature on the Malian conflict, this article will apply Benjamin Lessing's model on the logic of violence in criminal wars to JNIM. Through the adoption of Lessing's model, this article will demonstrate how JNIM's insurgency can be considered as a case of violent corruption in the context of a war of constraint. Combining qualitative and quantitative methods, this paper will show firstly, how the Malian civil war should be conceived as a war of constraint rather than a war of conquest; secondly, how JNIM is using violence in order to restrict the implementation of the rule of law in some regions which are strategic also for its financing activities. By adopting this new framework, it will be possible to overcome some conundrums characterising the debate on the Malian insurgency and to highlight some relevant topics for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The French intervention in Mali in early 2013 emphasizes that the decision-makers in Paris, Brussels, and Washington considered the establishment of the radical Islamist regime in Northern Mali a threat to their security interests. The widespread instability including the rise of radical Islamist groups in Somalia was perceived as a threat to western interests. It is the core argument of the paper if western powers decide to provide security in Africa, they will be inclined to use proxy instead of deploying own troops. Security provision by proxy in African means that African troops are doing the actual fighting and peacekeeping on the ground while western powers basically pay the costs, the logistics, and the training of local African troops. The paper concludes that the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) in Somalia and The African-led International Support Mission to Mali (AFISMA) in Mali are proxies for the USA and the European Union. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper offers insight into Malian men navigating their endangered hegemonic masculinities post deportation. Being returned against their will with empty hands, many see these difficulties as a potential hindrance to their ability to stand their ground. Tracing the representations and conduct of life of these men, this article explores deportees trying to form part of their communities given financial and migratory constraints, and often collective immobilization, vis-à-vis social obligations and the expectation to re-emigrate. Based on cases primarily from rural and some from urban southern Mali, the data selected from eight months of ethnographic fieldwork with former deportees and their social surroundings show how reinterpretations of suffering, working hard, and courage help to adapt to daily life post deportation. These strategies potentially allow for recovering one's masculine dignity through a specific 'adventure-hood' integrated into a new masculine repertoire after deportation. This article analyzes how young and elder men's narrations and practices contribute to a review of the norms and hierarchies in Malian society, and thus to concepts of changing masculinities and relations between men in Africa. In highlighting a little-discussed case of mostly inner African, reversed South-North migration the article goes beyond one-sided interpretations of masculine crises and hegemony. It thereby contributes to masculinities as well as post deportation studies at the intersections of age, generation, financial status and the experience of im/mobility after deportations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pesticide markets have grown far faster than regulatory monitoring capacity in West Africa. As a result, fraudulent pesticides (unregistered and counterfeit) have become widely available. This paper focuses on glyphosate, the region's most widely used pesticide. Purchase of 100 glyphosate samples from 50 different retailers across Mali found that 45% were fraudulent. Laboratory testing revealed that fraudulent glyphosate products contained 8-10% less active ingredient than registered products. Together, variable quality and widespread underdosing raise serious risks of accelerating weed resistance. These results suggest a clear need for more aggressive monitoring of pesticide markets, product quality and resulting environmental impacts. For practical purposes, farmers can protect themselves by purchasing only products duly registered by Mali's regulator, the Comité Sahélien des Pesticides (CSP). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the role of earth shrines in generating and maintaining social order and cohesion in a Dogon village on the Bandiagara escarpment (Mali, West Africa), in a context of scarcity. Earth shrines are erected at significant points in the landscape and in remote times symbolised the foundation of the territory. They form part of the ritual control of space by reinforcing, through sacrificial practice, a symbolic boundary that encloses and protects the village space. Through their yearly reactivation, this practice firstly enables the Dogon to strengthen their relationship with their god, their ancestors and the spirits that own the place and, secondly, it aims to renew social relationships and maintain the cohesion and continuity of the society whilst simultaneously conveying a sense of well-being. This paper examines the materiality, efficacy and activation principles of Dogon earth shrines that operate through the intervention of complementary living substances: millet and blood. These earth shrines function on an ontological principle of containment by which people protect themselves, act and dwell in the world. That is to say, they endow active principles and play a part in forming a local cosmology in a harsh and changing world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Tilemsi Valley has long been heralded as a focal region in the development of West African cultural complexity. The Lower Tilemsi Valley Project began in 2005, with the aim of clarifying the archaeological significance of this region and refining its chronology. This paper examines the pottery from these excavations, advocating an integrative approach to analysis in which pottery production is located within an historical and socio-economic context. It does not present a reified 'type' of Lower Tilemsi pottery, but instead describes a regional-scale technological tradition, whilst focusing on the local scale of adaptive change and technical innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Non-formal education (NFE) is now considered as playing a critical role in the achievement of the objective of Education for All, by reaching the learning needs of youth and adults who do not have access to formal education, increasing their employment opportunities and therefore contributing to poverty alleviation. Yet there is still insufficient knowledge available on the relationships between NFE, learning needs of out-of-school youth and adults, and employment. This paper intends to contribute to the debate by discussing both the data collected in rural Mali and the evidence drawn from a household survey on the outcomes of the Educational Centres for Development (Centres d'education pour le developpement - CEDs), which address out-of-school youth in rural areas. This paper argues that the effective approach of the CED programme is similar to formal schooling, with some adjustments in order to meet what is considered as the specific learning needs of out-of-school youth. However, CEDs are more adapted to boys' learning needs than they are to girls'. This paper also demonstrates that the CED programme has no effect on the scope of activities of young people as they stay in their village but do improve the way these activities are carried out and widens their employment opportunities as they migrate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2020, almost 50% of dictatorships included multiple parties in their government. Existing research has not studied this systematically, and generally considers granting outsiders access to ministerial cabinets a risky and costly strategy. This article provides evidence of authoritarian multiparty governments (AMGs) being a global and increasingly common phenomena. We argue that AMGs are a power-sharing strategy whereby autocrats co-opt outsiders through cabinet appointments to divide the opposition and consolidate their rule. Using individual-level data on ministers' partisan affiliation in autocracies worldwide, we show that AMGs positively correlate with ethnic divides, civil war, and "democratic" institutions, and we use new measures of power sharing to demonstrate that coalition partners often exert a real influence through their ministerial mandates. Our findings suggest that AMG is an overlooked survival strategy for autocrats and highlight the need to focus more on the organization and composition of the political executive in autocracies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this Web 2.0 era, various and massive tourist experiences and reviews presented on social networks have become important information for tourism research. In this paper, we apply social media to explore and study the tourism industry of Bamako, Mali. Over 2000 reviewers and their comments about Bamako's hotels and restaurants from TripAdvisor and Facebook were collected. Also, we integrate official tourism statistic data and field surveying data into the online review dataset. Data mining and statistic method are used to analyze the data for purpose of exploring the characteristics about tourism industry in Bamako. And we find that: (i) Most tourists are coming to Bamako for business purpose, and they incline to choose the hotels with better service and security condition; (ii) Comments on social media would greatly affect travelers' choice on hotels; (iii) Most travelers are satisfied about Bamako's accommodation services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent years have seen a flood of pseudo-facts and falsely precise data on land deals. This has led some to call for a more careful approach to the study of land deals that moves away from the current hectare-centric focus towards a grounded case-study methodology. Heeding such calls, this contribution draws on fieldwork undertaken in Mali during 2011 to examine a well-known land deal, the Malibya project, which involved a contract for the transfer of control of 100,000 hectares of land within theOffice du Niger. Locally and globally, the deal was denounced following the destruction of homes and gardens as a result of a canal development associated with project. In contrast, the Malian government has argued such projects are vital for expanded irrigation infrastructure and thus securing food self-sufficiency for Mali. Somewhere in between are the farmers of theOffice du Niger, some of whom argue for the cessation of the project and others of whom argue the expansion of irrigation in the zone could benefit farmers, particularly those without sufficient access to land. This paper explores the differing viewpoints of the actors involved and the role the land-grabbing frame has played in mobilising these different responses. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Applying John R. Commons's institutional economic framework, this paper analyzes the evolution of key institutions in the Malian cotton sector, starting with Mali's independence in 1960 to the ongoing market-oriented reforms in the 2000s. In accordance with Commons's economic theory, institutional changes in the Malian Cotton sector have led to both intended and unintended consequences, impacting economic performance at the farm, gin, and state levels. This has, in turn, contributed to the emergence of new limiting factors. At present, lack of adequate technical advising, indebtedness, issues related to input access, discordance between farmers and their union leader representatives, unreasonable seed cotton prices, delays in payment, and low cotton yields are the current limiting factors to desired economic performance. Based on these findings, we draw policy recommendations for revitalizing the Malian cotton sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper considers apprenticeship as a model of education that both teaches technical skills and provides the grounding for personal formation. The research presented is based on long-term anthropological fieldwork with minaret builders in Yemen, mud masons in Mali and fine-woodwork trainees in London. These case studies of on-site learning and practice support an expanded notion of knowledge that exceeds propositional thinking and language and centrally includes the body and skilled performance. Crafts – like sport, dance and other skilled physical activities – are largely communicated, understood and negotiated between practitioners without words, and learning is achieved through observation, mimesis and repeated exercise. The need for an interdisciplinary study of communication and understanding from the body is therefore underlined, and the paper suggests a way forward drawing on linguistic theory and recent neurological findings. It is argued that the validation and promotion of skilled practice as ‘intelligent’ is necessary for raising the status and credibility of apprentice-style learning within our Western systems of education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses two issues that have only been marginally discussed in the literature about peace operations: First, it investigates the legitimacy of peace operations from the perspective of populations of states that receive them. Secondly, it assesses how host populations perceive different types of peace interventions; by the UN, by a regional organization and by an individual state. A conceptual framework of the local legitimacy of peace operations is applied to an analysis of the perceptions of the French, ECOWAS and UN interventions in Mali in 2013–14. Local perception was measured by an analysis of Malian newspaper articles and interviews with (mainly southern) civil society actors. The results suggest that local actors negotiate between pragmatic and ideological conceptions of legitimacy. While French forces are pragmatically valued for their military achievements, they receive little ideological legitimacy. The regional force has high ideological legitimacy but disappoints in its performance on the ground. The UN force scores low in ideological legitimacy and is ambiguous in terms of pragmatic legitimacy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article presents a critical analysis on the interrelated yet distinctive approaches of various peace processes, namely: peace mediation, peacekeeping and peacebuilding. The critique aims to broaden the understanding of the extent to which peace processes adapt to complex environments marked by cycles of violence, and the extent to which these adaptations align. This understanding is particularly critical given the complexities of current peace processes, which often involve overlapping interventions in persistently violent settings. To address this need, the article draws on the concept of adaptive alignment, which views peace processes as dynamic and interconnected systems that continuously adapt to the evolving nature of complex conflict-affected situations. Adaptive alignment focuses on maintaining peace through adaptability, offering a nuanced understanding of how peace initiatives collectively engage to mitigate violence and achieve sustainable peace. The concept is further illustrated through examination of the specific cases of the Democratic Republic of Congo and Mali. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study chronicles a 14-year partnership between a Malian rural village and US academics to curb childhood malnutrition. Villagers described agricultural/nutritional traditions while expressing a desire for improved quality of life for the future. Through holistic observation and listening, student/faculty partners developed a trusting relationship, and documented the community's fundamental knowledge-base. Collaborators studied children's dietary intake to predict micronutrient deficiencies. Villagers ultimately chose to participate in the national lunch program and to additionally supplement children's diets with eggs. The Expansive Collaborative Model described in this article, exemplifies a cross-cultural approach which could effectively mitigate malnutrition in remote African villages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Researchers have shown how UN stabilization peace operations mix liberal and illiberal goals and strategies. Yet, further research is needed to theorize and comprehend illiberal peacebuilding features of stabilization operations. This article fills this gap by demonstrating how UN stabilization operations wield illiberal peacebuilding practices. Building upon previous scholarship, we understand illiberal peacebuilding both as an approach and outcome which is oriented by and helps diffuse illiberal norms in the societies where illiberal peacebuilding is instrumentalized by local, regional and international actors. We frame UN stabilization operations in the CAR, the DRC, and Mali as illiberal peacebuilding processes infused with illiberal strategies and show that liberal actors can engage with illiberal strategies for peace promotion. We also analyse peace agreements that accompany these missions as illiberal peacebuilding outcomes and show how these are shaped by illiberal norms. Our key finding is that a set of illiberal norms – exclusion, violence, power inequality and authoritarianism – are central for both UN stabilization operations and peace agreements signed in CAR, DRC and Mali. Therefore, we challenge the UN discourse that stabilization is a needed first step towards liberal and inclusive peace agreements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates what is commonly called multilingual writing. Based on case studies from Mali, and drawing on a number of West African settings, it argues that in fact, not all 'multilingual' writing is in effect multilingual. The article proposes a two-tiered classification of types of writing, based on linguistic properties of texts and the differing perspectives of writers and readers. This analysis contrasts writers' intentions to write (in) a particular language vs. to mobilise linguistic resources in a more holistic manner. The latter type of writing, it is argued, is better characterised as language-independent, since writers do not draw borders between what can be analysed as different languages from a code-based perspective often applied by analysts. The co-existence, spaces, and potentials of language-based and language-independent writing are examined in detail. This type of writing is invisible to language planners and often taken to be unreadable, akin to the mythical writing on the wall inspiring the title of the paper. Yet, in contexts with low educational resources and great linguistic diversity, language-independent writing presents a resilient and underappreciated alternative to language-based literacies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In agricultural policy and programmes, cooperatives have been framed as organizational fix for addressing institutional voids and market imperfections in rural Africa. By way of guaranteeing scale, quality of produce, and professionalism, cooperatives are assumed to be capable to subvert current trading patterns and contribute to sustainable market access for small-scale farmers. However, such change logic does not hold up well with the circumstances of African farmers and traders. We argue that for understanding how a cooperative organizes sustainable market linkages, attention should be paid to its capacity to navigate within its specific context. This article traces the emergence and development of two cooperatives in distinct contexts, Uganda and Mali. We use a critical institutionalist approach, called bricolage, to show how in both cases farmers organize sustainable market access by blending novel arrangements with existing institutions embedded in social and economic relations. We suggest agricultural policy and programmes to shift attention to the ability of a cooperative to embed new institutions in socio-historical shaped local realities rather than requiring them to comply to an ideal-type organization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Counter-terrorism initiatives are failing across the African continent. A major reason for this failure lies in the state-centric and military-focused nature of many counter-terrorism initiatives. In Africa, the state is often the source of insecurity for ordinary citizens. Any military strengthening of an illegitimate African state by the international community not only serves to bolster a predatory state but also undermines the human security of citizens. More importantly, such an approach conflates sub-state and international terrorism and serves to bolster the latter, thereby undermining regional and international security further. Put simply, current counter-terrorism initiatives are counter-productive. This paper focuses on counter-terrorism efforts in Nigeria and Mali with a special focus on US initiatives to combat terrorism in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) has been both a formal and an informal part of many developing economies for decades. It is estimated that 13 to 20 million people are involved in artisanal mining globally. While it has been a prevalent part of poverty alleviation strategies worldwide, the people involved in ASM are a largely understudied population. This study uses a combination of remotely sensed data and fieldwork questionnaires, compiled and analyzed in a GIS, to model the spatial demographics of the ASM population in Kenieba, Mali. This paper and map discuss and illustrate the regional population of Kenieba, the number of miners per mine and the spatial-temporal movement patterns and proximity to mine sites. The Kenieba study area is located in western Mali along the Senegalese and Guinean borders. At most sites both gold and diamonds are being mined, as the mining of gold is a more profitable activity in this region than diamond mining. The map features three, 3-D figures representing land cover topography and population with the results of a path-distance analysis that display the time it would take an artisanal miner on foot to traverse the terrain of the study area. Due to the 3-D, oblique orientation of the map the scale varies throughout the figures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Connecting science with policy has always been challenging for both scientists and policymakers. In Ghana, Mali and Senegal, multi-stakeholder national science-policy dialogue platforms on climate-smart agriculture (CSA) were setup to use scientific evidence to create awareness of climate change impacts on agriculture and advocate for the mainstreaming of climate change and CSA into agricultural development plans. Based on the platforms' operations and achievements, we used semi-structured questionnaire interviews and reviewed technical reports produced by the platforms to analyse how their modes of operation and achievements improve understanding of the science-policy interfaces between agricultural and climate change decision making. Results showed that these platforms constitute an innovative approach to effectively engaging decision-makers and sustainably mainstreaming climate change into development plans. Effective science-policy interaction requires: (a) institutionalizing dialogue platforms by embedding them within national institutions, which improves their credibility, relevance and legitimacy among policymakers; (b) two-way communication, which contributes substantially to the co-development of solutions that address climate change vulnerabilities and impacts; and (c) relevant communication products and packaging of evidence that aligns with country priorities, which facilitates its uptake in policy-making processes. We conclude with a framework of sustainable operation for such platforms based on lessons learnt in the three countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines both decorative and formal change in the ceramics of the Tichitt tradition of Mauritania (c. 1900-400 BC), and this tradition's expression in the Middle Niger, the Faita Facies (c. 1300 - 200 BC). Using attribute-based comparisons, a wide range of assemblages from Mauritania and Mali are utilised to demonstrate how temporal divisions may be discerned in this sequence. Particular attention is paid to the definition of Early and Late Faita ceramic phases and the origins of finewares in the Middle Niger. It is notable that Tichitt Tradition ceramics feature frequent and early examples of cord roulette use in the West African Sahel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at ways of improving agricultural service provision to rural producers through the adoption and integration of innovative tools for managing producer organizations in Mali. It considers a bottom-up approach to agricultural service provision and the factors that enable it to be scaled up efficiently. It demonstrates that building on complementarities between partners and adopting a needs-based approach creates relatively greater social impact. Our case study links the practical experience of a programme to the wider theoretical framework of social capital. We conclude that delivering affordable agricultural services to promote rural entrepreneurship in Mali will depend on (I) strategically incorporating past successes into programme interventions, (ii) building strong partnerships that foster complementarities, (iii) setting specific targets that empower all rural stakeholders, and (iv) establishing internal arrangements that ensure sustainability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This paper reports the first systematic excavations at Essouk-Tadmakka (Mali), one of the major West African trading towns that enabled the unprecedented flourishing of trans-Saharan trade during the early Islamic era (c. AD 650-1500). The 6.5 m excavated sequence (dating from the mid-first millennium AD to c. 1400) significantly improves understanding of Essouk-Tadmakka's 'prehistoric' and historic periods and, in doing so, provides a wealth of new evidence to help answer key questions about early Islamic trans-Saharan trade. Firstly, the excavations shed light on the changing scale of trade over time and space, providing unprecedented early (eighth/ninth century AD) evidence for extensive trade and new ideas about the geography of early trade routes. Additionally, new ideas are provided on socio-cultural developments in the trade, including changes that occurred both during the Almoravid expansion and the rule of the Empire of Mali. Lastly, the excavations significantly improve understanding of the movement of trans-Saharan commodities, especially gold. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Africanists must increasingly account for disparities in the success of the continent's democratic experiments. This paper addresses why three countries—Benin, Ghana and Mali—have become surprisingly successful democracies. The argument begins with the leftist (African socialist) regimes in each case, which set the countries on a path with unintended consequences that supported democratisation over the long run. Several key steps emerge. The leftist regimes were led by minority presidents who attempted ideological incorporation in ways that attenuated the political salience of ethnic identity. Results differed from other African regimes in the ways that neo-patrimonialism interacted with ethnicity. At Africa's critical juncture (1989-92), the lack of a dominant ethno-patrimonial coalition opened political space for more programmatic contestation. Opposition became likelier to coalesce and cohere on non-ethnic bases, and combined with constitutional militaries to make these cases among the likeliest to consolidate democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review presents a preliminary account of the Lithium exploration sector in the Paleoproterozoic rocks of West Africa, a relatively new field of research, and assesses its future prospects in light of the green transition-driven demand for the metal. The deposits in Ghana, Mali, Burkina Faso, Côte d'Ivoire, Senegal, and Niger form the basis of this study. The WAC predominantly possesses LCT pegmatites while a few with hybrid LCT + NYF characteristics have been reported, such as the Mangodara pegmatite district in southeastern Burkina Faso. The terrane'sanalysed pegmatite deposits contain 1.11--2.0% Li2O. The pegmatites may form as a swarm of dykes in peraluminous granites of varied composition formed from Eburnean continent -- continent collision. They typically contain spodumene, quartz, feldspar, muscovite, lepidolite, beryl, tourmaline, and fluorite. Spodumene is the most prevalent lithium-bearing mineral in the deposits, with the occurence of rare secondary lepidolite and zinnwaldite. Dyke thickness, ranging from 10 to 80 metres, may affect the pegmatites' lithium-bearing potential. Hydrothermal alteration albitizes and greisenizes pegmatitic structures. Despite the pegmatites' varied genetic features, the Goulamina and Issia deposits in La Cote d'Ivoire have an inferred genetic link with their host granites. The WAC's Paleoproterozoic lithium-bearing pegmatites share certain traits that make them easier to extract. Lithium exploration in West Africa depends on geological investigations, technological improvements, investor funding, and environmental concerns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What began in 2004 as a peace education program anchored in the Ciwara community school in the town of Kati just outside the capitol city of Bamako has become a longer-term peacebuilding project now located in camps for internally displaced persons in Mali. This project has been led by students and faculty from the Institut Universitaire pour Technologie of the Université des Lettres et des Sciences Humaines de Bamako, in partnership with students and faculty in the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities of Michigan State University. Together they have created Cours Collaboratifs Éducation à la Paix whose primary activity thus far has been a peace building project through photovoice. The project in these camps for internally displaced persons is designed to empower Malian university student mentors and their young mentees. Mentors and mentees are assisted by professional Malian photographers, staff from several national and international non-governmental organizations, and Michigan State University students and faculty using a video conferencing software. This essay describes the evolution of the CCÉP photovoice project, some of the ethical and political challenges we have encountered, and its potential for future everyday peacebuilding dialogs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)