JNIM’s shift from territory to state functions in Mali

On June 24, 2026, traffic resumed on the strategic axis linking 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 reopening itself, the manner in which it was achieved deserves attention. According to information available, the return to circulation was not secured through a decisive military operation by the state, but following mediation conducted by local notables and community actors with the jihadist group.

This episode alone invites us to reconsider some frameworks for understanding conflict in the Sahel. It suggests that conflict dynamics are no longer merely a succession of offensives, withdrawals, or territorial conquests. They also play out in the capacity to open or close a road, guarantee continuity of exchanges, influence mobility, or condition the ordinary functioning of collective life. In other words, the center of gravity of competition seems to be gradually shifting. Thus, the question may no longer be simply who controls a territory, but rather who actually exercises the functions that allow a society to operate and, in doing so, produces authority. Starting from this hypothesis, I propose to re-read recent developments in JNIM’s strategy and, more broadly, the transformations of war and the making of authority in the Sahelian margins.

I. From conquest of territories to conquest of functions

What is changing today in the Sahel is perhaps not only the geography of war, but its objective. Competition seems to focus less on durable territorial conquest and more on controlling the functions that enable 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 road blockades, movement restrictions, supply bans, commercial route checks, and pressure on main corridors linking Bamako to Kayes, Nioro-du-Sahel, Ségou, and Mourdiah into its repertoire. These operations produce effects that go far beyond the military dimension. They affect supply chains, market functioning, people’s mobility, economic activities, and, more broadly, the ordinary conditions of collective life.

This shift reflects a strategic change. For a long time, war in the Sahel has been understood through a map of controlled territories, conquered localities, or lost and regained military positions. This reading remains relevant, but it becomes insufficient to understand current transformations of the conflict. JNIM today pushes 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 movement, guaranteeing continuity of exchanges, protecting supply chains, dispensing justice, arbitrating conflicts, organizing taxation, and enforcing common rules. When these functions themselves become the main object of competition, the nature of 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 ground that JNIM appears to move the confrontation. The movement does not necessarily seek to directly administer the territories where it operates. Instead, it seems 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, constitute the concrete utility of the state. Roads are arguably 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 pass through that space.

This shift from territorial control to flow control constitutes, in my view, one of the most significant strategic changes in the war in the Sahel. The real 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, the very nature of conflict transforms.

II. 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 mean 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 mistaken to view these communities as a homogeneous bloc. Traders, transporters, customary chiefs, religious authorities, herders, and rural youth do not share the same interests or relationships with armed groups. It is precisely these divergences that make communities permanent spaces of negotiation, compromise, but also tensions over the production of local order.

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

Sahelian spaces precisely illustrate this interweaving. State authority constantly interacts with traditional legitimacies embodied by customary chiefs, religious authorities, and local notables, but also with a legitimacy that JNIM seeks to progressively build. This legitimacy does not primarily rest on the personal charisma of its leaders. It stems rather from its capacity to produce concrete order, to quickly adjudicate disputes, to secure certain circulation axes, to regulate markets, or to sanction behaviors it deems deviant. This is not, strictly speaking, charismatic authority in Weber’s sense. JNIM tends rather to build what could be called performative legitimacy: a legitimacy that derives neither from institutional status, nor from traditional heritage, nor exclusively from the prestige of a leader, but from repeated demonstration of its ability to exercise certain functions that populations usually 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 seek is not so much the immediate conquest of the state apparatus as its progressive functional disempowerment, particularly in territorial margins where state presence remains discontinuous. By investing in the concrete functions that structure daily life—securing movement, adjudicating conflicts, regulating exchanges, or organizing access to resources—it does not replace the state; it gradually shifts the center of gravity. The issue is no longer to occupy central power institutions, but to transfer, in the peripheries, the functions that underpin political authority. The state remains legally sovereign, but it risks losing what constitutes, in a Weberian sense, the heart of its practical legitimacy: the recognized capacity to sustainably 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 is capable of building a parallel state, but whether it gradually succeeds in reconfiguring the social conditions of authority production. State-making does not proceed only 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. Each successful mediation, each reopened road, each dispute settled outside public institutions contributes, even unintentionally, to shifting the boundaries of political legitimacy.

In this perspective, the main challenge for Sahelian states likely does not lie solely in military reconquest of territories. It consists above all in becoming again, in the eyes of populations, the most credible actor to ensure security, dispense justice, guarantee mobility, and produce predictable order. The decisive battle being fought today in the Sahel is perhaps not primarily between two forces seeking to control a territory. It pits two competing claims to become, in the eyes of populations, the actor capable of sustainably organizing collective life. In other words, the conflict is less about the monopoly of violence than about the socially recognized capacity to produce authority.