JNIM’s move from territory to function
On June 24, 2026, traffic resumed along the vital route connecting Bamako to Mourdiah and Nara in central-western Mali, ending weeks of blockade imposed by JNIM (Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin). More than the road’s reopening itself, the manner in which it occurred deserves attention. The return to traffic was not achieved through a decisive military operation by the state, but through mediations brokered by local notables and community actors with the jihadist group.
This episode alone calls for a rethinking of how we understand conflict in the Sahel. It suggests that the dynamics of the conflict are no longer simply a series of offensives, retreats, or territorial conquests. Instead, they also revolve around the ability to open or close a road axis, guarantee the continuity of trade, influence mobility, or condition the ordinary functioning of collective life. In other words, the center of gravity of competition seems to be gradually shifting. The question may no longer be who controls a territory, but who concretely exercises the functions that allow a society to operate and, in doing so, produces authority. It is from this hypothesis that I propose to re-read the recent evolution of JNIM’s strategy and, more broadly, the transformations of war and the making of authority in the Sahelian margins.
I. From territorial control to functional capture
What is changing in the Sahel today is not just the geography of war; it is its object. Competition increasingly revolves less around durable territorial conquest and more around controlling the functions that allow a society to operate. This evolution is far from trivial. It invites us to shift our focus from spaces to flows, from territories to functions, from military conquest to the production of order.
Developments observed in Mali since 2024 illustrate this transformation. Without abandoning attacks on armed forces, JNIM has gradually integrated into its action repertoire road blockades, movement restrictions, supply bans, controls over commercial axes, and pressure on key corridors linking Bamako to Kayes, Nioro-du-Sahel, Ségou, and Mourdiah. These operations produce effects that go far beyond the military dimension. They affect supply chains, market operations, 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 lost and recaptured military positions. That reading remains relevant but is insufficient to grasp the current transformations. JNIM is now pushing further a logic found in several contemporary forms of insurgency: control over functions is becoming progressively as important as control over spaces.
A state does not exist solely because it exercises sovereignty over a territory. It also exists because it fulfills a set of functions that populations consider essential: securing movement, guaranteeing the continuity of exchanges, protecting supply chains, delivering justice, arbitrating conflicts, organizing taxation, and enforcing common rules. When these functions themselves become the main object of competition, the nature of the conflict changes. The question is no longer just who controls a territory, but who is able to ensure its functioning.
It is precisely on this terrain that JNIM seems to be shifting the confrontation. The movement does not necessarily seek to administer directly the territories where it is present. Instead, it appears to invest in the functions that make the state socially indispensable, while leaving the costs of daily administration to the state. I call this process a functional capture of the state: a strategy by which an armed actor aims less at exercising full territorial sovereignty than at appropriating the functions that, in the eyes of populations, underpin the concrete usefulness of the state. Roads undoubtedly represent the most visible expression of this transformation. They cease to be mere transport infrastructure and become genuine political institutions. Closing them, reopening them, filtering goods, taxing commercial flows, or conditioning population mobility 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 traverse that space.
This shift from controlling territories to controlling flows constitutes, in my view, one of the most significant strategic mutations of the war in the Sahel. The true question may therefore no longer be who occupies territories, but who controls the functions that give meaning to those territories. Because when functions change hands before territories do, the very nature of the conflict transforms.
II. When the state is no longer the sole producer of authority
This transformation also sheds light on the role of communities. Their intervention in lifting the blockade does not necessarily imply adherence to JNIM’s political project. It mainly reflects the constraints faced by populations whose survival conditions depend on the reopening of roads, access to markets, and the continuity of trade. In these circumstances, negotiation is less a political preference than a survival rationality. However, it would be wrong to see these communities as a homogeneous bloc. Traders, transporters, customary chiefs, religious authorities, herders, and rural youth do not share the same interests or the same relationships with armed groups. It is precisely these divergences that make communities permanent spaces of negotiation, compromise, and also tensions around the production of local order.
This reality also invites a rethink of the making of the state. Since Max Weber, the modern state has been understood 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.
The Sahelian spaces precisely illustrate this interweaving. The authority of the state constantly interacts with traditional legitimacies embodied by customary chiefs, religious authorities, and local notables, but also with a legitimacy that JNIM gradually seeks to build. This does not rest primarily on the personal charisma of its leaders. Rather, it proceeds from its capacity to produce a concrete order, to adjudicate disputes quickly, to secure certain circulation axes, to regulate markets, or to sanction behaviors it deems deviant. This is not, strictly speaking, a charismatic authority in the Weberian sense. JNIM tends rather to construct what could be called performative legitimacy: a legitimacy that derives neither from an institutional status, nor from a traditional heritage, nor exclusively from the prestige of a leader, but from the repeated demonstration of its ability to exercise certain functions that populations normally associate with the state. The lifting of the Mourdiah and Nara blockade thus illustrates a configuration in which 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 balances; while JNIM seeks to convert its coercive capacity into governing capacity.
I would go even further. What JNIM seems to be pursuing is not so much the immediate conquest of the state apparatus as its gradual functional dispossession, particularly in the territorial margins where the state’s presence remains discontinuous. By investing in the concrete functions that structure the daily lives of populations – securing movement, arbitrating conflicts, regulating exchanges, or organizing access to resources – it does not replace the state; it progressively shifts its center of gravity. The issue 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 issue may no longer be whether JNIM can build a parallel state, but whether it is gradually reconfiguring the social conditions of authority production. The making of the state does not only proceed from constitutions, institutions, or coercive capacities; it also results from the daily recognition of whoever 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.
In this perspective, the main challenge for Sahelian states probably does not lie solely in the military reconquest of territories. It consists above all in becoming, in the eyes of populations, the most credible actor to ensure security, deliver justice, guarantee mobility, and produce a predictable order. The decisive battle being fought today in the Sahel may not primarily pit two forces seeking to control a territory. It pits 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.
