Abdourahamane Idrissa

Abdourahamane Idrissa is a political scientist and historian based jointly at the Center for African Studies at Leiden University (Netherlands) and the Africa Institute in Sharjah (United Arab Emirates). His research program focuses on the sociopolitics of state-building in West Africa. The context of security crises and the decline of the state and democracy in the Sahel informs his recent work. He is also working on a history of "the Songhay Empire and the birth of modernity" for the London publisher Allen Lane/Penguin Books.

The project

Series of four lectures on the Sahel

1. The Sahel between Salafism and Sovereignty
   The conference will focus on conceptualizing political Salafism and sovereignty as they manifest themselves in three countries in the Sahelian interior: Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger. The issues analyzed will focus in particular on the content (concepts, project) and sociological foundations of these two ideological phenomena, using in particular the method of ideological analysis developed in the book, The Politics of Islam in the Sahel. A comparison will be made between the three countries in order to identify similarities and differences.
    
2. Crisis of democratic norms in West Africa: the question of political settlement
   The literature on political settlement shows that a formal political framework (constitution, institutional landscape, rules of the game) is only functional or stable if there is a tacit agreement between the relevant elite groups to act within its constraints and opportunities.
    
3. The Conflict Zone in the Sahel: The Periphery on Fire?
   The conference develops the concept of periphery to analyze the extent and limits of the conflict zone in the Sahel, based on three previously published works, "Limits to Radicalization in Southern Niger", "Le Feu à la paille : le Burkina Faso dans la zone de conflits" (Fire in the Straw: Burkina Faso in the Conflict Zone) and "Mapping the Sahel". The concept applies both to the Sahel itself—the periphery of the international political economy—and to the conflict zone as such, which, within countries, is mainly located in peripheral areas (which, coincidentally, are often also border areas).
    
4. "One foot cannot follow two paths": religious-political dualism in the Songhay Empire.
   At the end of the 15th century, Sonni Ali Ber, king of Gao, conquered a vast empire that stretched from Djenné and Macina to the present-day W region (Niger-Benin border)."

Hosting Institution: École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) - Institut d’étude de l’Islam et des Sociétés du Monde Musulman (IISMM)

Selective Bibliography

• "Niamey Nights", Granta, 13 Février 2024
• "L’Efficace politique du sentiment : une histoire sahélienne", RIS, n° 133, Printemps 2024
• "Sudan’s Repressed Democracy", New York Review of Books, 18 Juillet 2023
• "History of Niger", in Oxford Research Encyclopedia, Fév. 2022.
• "The Sahel: A Cognitive Mapping", in New Left Review, No. 123, Nov-Dec. 2021