Research Agenda

The crisis in the Sahel continues to deteriorate. Large-scale stabilisation operations have arguably failed to bring about long-term peace and stability.

My research shifts the focus from large-scale and top-down stabilisation operations, to grassroots civilian action in rural contexts affected by war. Building on a rich literature on civilian agency and behaviour in wartime, my research asks questions such as: how do communities navigate war? What shapes collective decision-making under duress and uncertainty? How do we explain starkly different choices people make during war? How do community responses shift and evolve over time?

Local leaders and citizens were the most affected by the war, as state representatives were chased out early on by insurgents and international operations were mostly confined to urban centres. Left to their own devices, local leaders, notables and citizens were pushed to the brink, but developed creative solutions for dealing with armed actors - both jihadists and militias who sought their allegiance. Yet little is understood about these initiatives, or how they shaped the trajectory of the conflict, whether through building localised islands of peace through accords, or by escalating the conflict’s intensity by developing militias to fight.

My research relies heavily on field-work based methods from in-depth interviews and oral histories, to moderate forms of participant observation and case study analysis.

I am due to submit my doctoral thesis entitled, “Resist or Submit? Evolving community responses to jihadist mobilisation in Central Mali”. I am completing my thesis at the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford. My research is currently funded by the NUPI-led FRIPRO project, Jihadist Insurgent Governance in the Sahel.