Photo: “Mali: small scale gold mining” / Global Environment Facility (GEF) / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Jihadists in the Sahel have opportunistically sought resources – kidnapping, smuggling – but it remains to be seen whether gold mining is a game-changer.
In this article, the principal investigator in the PREVEX-project, Morten Bøås, delves into the realm of resource mobilization in insurgent movements which usually prefer asymmetric warfare. It is this mode of war that the jihadist insurgents are waging in the Sahel, who have come to dominate it. The mobilization of resources by jihadist rebels has been the subject of much speculation and is sometimes presented as a sort of mystery.
Although the peripheries of the Sahel may seem an isolated place, situated on a lost highway far from the main axes of the world economy, they are unofficially and illegally well connected to the world of globalization, thanks to the new economic opportunities offered by trans-Saharan trade. And lately, particular attention has been paid to the mobilization of resources by Sahelian jihadist insurgents in the form of small-scale gold mining.
Bøås argues that the mobilization of resources by the Jihadist insurgents in the Sahel is neither an enigma nor a mystery, but rather the story of a combination of ideology and pragmatism, in which the rebels have opportunely sought resources there. where they could find them, without getting too involved.
