As the France-led counter-insurgency campaign unfolds, this talk will detail Mali’s urgent political challenges ahead. Transcending the poisonous form of governance established in the last decade between Mali’s central authorities and its northern region will be the most arduous task. Many years of governance by proxy militias culminating in violent direct confrontation and nine months of occupation by Islamist forces in 2012 have left northern Mali deeply divided. The talk will trace recent dramatic changes in northern Mali’s politics and explore options to reweave its complex social fabric.

Dr Yvan Guichaoua joined the School of International Development at the University of East Anglia in July 2011. His research focuses on collective political violence, the dynamics of irregular armed groups and informal governance in West Africa. He completed a PhD in Development Economics at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales in 2004 then joined the Centre for Research on Inequality, Human Security and Ethnicity (CRISE) in Oxford as a research officer. In 2009-10, he held a teaching fellowship at Yale University, as a member of the Program on Order, Conflict and Violence (OCV). At CRISE and OCV, he worked on the drivers of youth enlistment in violent irregular armed groups. Dr Guichaoua has consulted with the French and Italian governments as well as NGOs such as Medecins San Frontieres, commentated extensively on the Sahel in the media, and he wrote the International Crisis Group’s July 2012 report on Mali.