The 2012 crisis in Mali: Ongoing empirical state failure

Abstract

In 2012 Mali faced a crisis disrupting nearly twenty years of democratization – a coup and rebel insurgency. This article investigates policy priorities amongst rural Malians living on the border of state and rebelcontrolled territory during the crisis. While academic and policy-making communities have focused largely on Mali’s recent and sudden regime and territorial breakdown, the villagers defined the crisis in terms of their unmet needs for public services and infrastructure amidst high food and water insecurity. Concern for the sudden ‘juridical state’ breakdown – the collapse of the democratic regime – was trumped by the focus on longterm ‘empirical state’ breakdown. Using recent Afrobarometer data on diverse dimensions of empirical statehood, we show that the problem of rural neglect emphasized by seminal scholars is persistent not only across Mali, but also across many African countries. The tendency of academics and policy makers to focus on the immediate or more volatile political problems of the coup and rebel insurgency facing the Malian state, while important, risks understating and underestimating the power of slow-moving crises of daily life that are more important to rural citizens. IN APRIL 2012, THE WORLD’S EYES TURNED to Mali’s political crisis – a coup and subsequent rebel takeover of three northern provinces. The coup disrupted nearly twenty years of multi-party elections, while armed movements, including those with secessionist and jihadist goals, took over nearly two-thirds of Mali’s geographical territory, causing over 400,000 Malians to flee. Academic, policy, and journalistic accounts of these events have focused on many aspects of the crisis, including determinants of the rebellion and coup, the French intervention, and the need to restore multi-party *Jaimie Bleck ( jbleck@nd.edu) is a Ford Family Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame. Kristin Michelitch (kristin.michelitch@vanderbilt.edu) is an Assistant Professor of Political Science and Littlejohn Faculty Fellow at Vanderbilt University. This research was funded with generous support from the National Science Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, the Catt Prize, the Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies, and the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts at the University of Notre Dame. We thank Michael Bratton, Nicolas van de Walle, Kevin Fridy and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments as well as Liana Cramer, Jae Won Kim, and our team in Mali for excellent research support. A previous version of this paper appeared as Afrobarometer Working Paper 155. African Affairs, 1–26 doi: 10.1093/afraf/adv038 © The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Royal African Society. All rights reserved 1 African Affairs Advance Access published August 10, 2015