JNIM’s strategy shift: conquering state functions in Mali’s Mourdiah and Nara

Mourdiah and Nara: JNIM and the conquest of state functions

On June 24, 2026, traffic resumed along the strategic road connecting Bamako to Mourdiah and Nara in central-western Mali, ending a weeks-long blockade imposed by JNIM (Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin). More than the mere reopening of this route, what demands attention is how it occurred. The return to circulation was not the result of a decisive military operation by the state, but rather of mediation efforts led by local dignitaries and community actors engaging with the jihadist group.

This single episode invites a reconsideration of certain analytical frameworks for understanding conflict in the Sahel. It suggests that the dynamics of the conflict are no longer limited to a series of offensives, retreats, or territorial conquests. They also play out in the ability to open or close a road, to ensure the continuity of exchanges, to influence mobility, or to condition the ordinary functioning of collective life. In other words, the center of gravity of the competition seems to be shifting gradually. Thus, the question may no longer be solely about who controls a territory, but rather who actually 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 recent developments in JNIM’s strategy and, more broadly, the transformations of war and the making of authority in the Sahelian margins.

I. From the conquest of territories to the conquest of functions

What is changing today in the Sahel is perhaps not only the geography of war, but its very object. Competition seems to focus less on the durable conquest of territories and more on controlling the functions that enable a society to function. This evolution is far from insignificant. It invites us to shift our gaze from spaces to flows, from territories to functions, from military conquest to the production of order.

Developments observed in Mali since 2024 illustrate this mutation. Without abandoning attacks on armed forces, JNIM has progressively incorporated road blockades, movement restrictions, supply bans, controls on commercial axes, and pressure on key corridors linking Bamako to Kayes, Nioro-du-Sahel, Ségou, and Mourdiah into its repertoire of action. 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 evolution reflects a strategic change. For a long time, the war in the Sahel was understood through a cartography of controlled territories, conquered localities, or military positions lost and regained. This reading remains relevant, but it has become insufficient to grasp the current transformations of the conflict. JNIM is now pushing further a logic found in several contemporary forms of insurgency: control of functions progressively becomes as important as control of 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 movements, guaranteeing the 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 the conflict transforms. The question is no longer just who controls a territory, but who is able to ensure its functioning.

It is precisely on this ground that JNIM seems to be moving the confrontation. The movement does not necessarily seek to directly administer the territories where it is established. Instead, it appears to invest in the functions that make the state socially indispensable, while leaving the state with 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 full territorial sovereignty than to appropriate the functions that, in the eyes of populations, constitute the concrete utility of the state. Roads are probably the most visible expression of this transformation. They cease to be mere transport infrastructure and become true political institutions. Closing them, reopening them, filtering goods, taxing commercial flows, or conditioning the mobility of populations means exercising prerogatives traditionally associated with public authority. From 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 real question may therefore no longer be who occupies the territories, but who controls the functions that give meaning to those territories. For when functions change hands before territories do, the very nature of the conflict is transformed.

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 signify 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 exchanges. In these circumstances, negotiation stems less from political preference than from a rationality of survival. However, it would be a mistake to consider these communities as a homogeneous bloc. Merchants, transporters, traditional 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 rethinking of state-making. Since Max Weber, the modern state has been conceived 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 embedded in a plurality of legitimacy registers, where rational-legal, traditional, and charismatic forms can coexist, compete, or mutually reinforce each other.

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 is progressively seeking to build. This legitimacy does not primarily rest on the personal charisma of its leaders. It proceeds rather from its capacity to produce concrete order, to arbitrate disputes swiftly, to secure certain travel axes, to regulate markets, or to sanction behaviors it deems deviant. It is thus not strictly speaking a charismatic authority in Weber’s sense. JNIM tends instead 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 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 one another; 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 will go even further. What JNIM seems to be seeking is not so much the immediate conquest of the state apparatus as its progressive 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 movements, arbitrating conflicts, regulating exchanges, or organizing access to resources – it does not replace the state; it progressively shifts the state’s 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 core of its practical legitimacy: the recognized capacity to durably produce collective order where people live. Before contesting the monopoly of legitimate violence, it seems to me that JNIM is primarily seeking 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. State-making proceeds not 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 involuntarily, to shifting the boundaries of political legitimacy.

From this perspective, the main challenge for Sahelian states probably lies not 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, dispense justice, guarantee mobility, and produce a predictable order. The decisive battle now being waged 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.