How JNIM is conquering state functions in Mali, from Mourdiah to Nara

On June 24, 2026, traffic returned to the strategic axis linking Bamako to Mourdiah and Nara, in central-western Mali, after several weeks of blockade imposed by JNIM (Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin). Beyond the reopening of this road, it is the manner in which it occurred that deserves attention. According to available information, the resumption of circulation was not achieved through a decisive military operation by the state, but rather through mediations led by local dignitaries and community actors with the jihadist group.

This episode alone invites a reconsideration of certain frameworks for understanding conflict in the Sahel. It suggests that the dynamic of the conflict is no longer limited to a succession of offensives, retreats, or territorial conquests. It also plays out in the ability to open or close a road axis, to guarantee 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 gradually shifting. Therefore, the question may no longer be solely about who controls a territory, but rather who concretely exercises the functions that allow a society to operate, and in doing so, produces authority. It is from this hypothesis that I propose to reinterpret recent developments in JNIM’s strategy and, more broadly, the transformations of war and the production of authority in the Sahelian margins.

I. From territorial conquest to conquest of functions

What is changing today in the Sahel may not only be the geography of war; it is its 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 trivial. 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 transformation. Without giving up attacks on armed forces, JNIM has gradually incorporated into its repertoire of action road blockades, movement restrictions, supply bans, control of commercial axes, and pressure on the main corridors linking Bamako to Kayes, Nioro-du-Sahel, Ségou, or Mourdiah. These operations produce effects that go far beyond the military dimension. They affect supply circuits, market functioning, population mobility, economic activities, and, more broadly, the ordinary conditions of collective life.

This evolution reflects a strategic change. For a long time, war in the Sahel was understood through a cartography of controlled territories, conquered localities, or lost and recaptured military positions. That reading remains relevant, but it becomes insufficient to understand the current transformations of the conflict. JNIM is now pushing further a logic found in several contemporary forms of insurgency: control of functions gradually becomes as important as control of spaces.

A state exists not only 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 circuits, administering justice, arbitrating conflicts, organizing taxation, and enforcing common rules. When these functions themselves become the main object of competition, the nature of conflict transforms. The question is no longer just about who controls a territory, but who is capable of ensuring its functioning.

It is precisely on this ground that JNIM appears to shift the confrontation. The movement does not necessarily seek to directly administer the territories where it is present. Instead, it seems 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 complete territorial sovereignty than to appropriate the functions that, in the eyes of populations, constitute the concrete utility of the state. Roads are undoubtedly the most visible expression of this transformation. They cease to be mere transport infrastructure and become real political institutions. Closing them, reopening them, filtering goods, taxing commercial flows, or conditioning population mobility amounts to 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 control of territories to control of 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 territories, but who controls the functions that give meaning to those territories. Because when functions change hands before territories, the very nature of 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. Above all, it reflects the constraints faced by populations whose survival conditions depend on the reopening of roads, access to markets, and continuity of exchanges. In these circumstances, negotiation is less a political preference than a rationality of survival. However, it would be wrong to consider these communities as a homogeneous bloc. Traders, transporters, customary chiefs, religious authorities, herders, and rural youth do not have the same interests or relationships with armed groups. It is precisely these divergences that make communities permanent spaces of negotiation, compromise, but also tensions around the production of local order.

This reality also invites us to rethink the production of the state. 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 inscribed in a plurality of registers of legitimacy, where rational-legal, traditional, and charismatic forms can coexist, compete, or reinforce each other.

Sahelian spaces precisely illustrate this intertwining. State authority constantly interacts with traditional legitimacies, embodied by customary chiefs, religious authorities, and local notables, but also with a legitimacy that JNIM seeks to construct progressively. This legitimacy does not rest primarily on the personal charisma of its leaders. It proceeds rather from its capacity to produce a concrete order, to arbitrate disputes swiftly, to secure certain circulation axes, to regulate markets, or to sanction behavior it deems deviant. This is not, strictly speaking, a charismatic authority in Weber’s sense. JNIM tends rather to construct what could be called performative legitimacy: a legitimacy that derives neither from institutional status, nor from traditional heritage, nor exclusively from the prestige of a leader, but from the repeated demonstration of its ability to exercise certain functions that populations normally 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 each other; 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 would even go 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 state presence remains discontinuous. By investing in the concrete functions that structure the daily life of populations – securing movements, arbitrating conflicts, regulating exchanges, or organizing access to resources – it does not replace the state; it gradually shifts its center of gravity. The stake 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 heart of its practical legitimacy: the recognized capacity to sustainably produce collective order where populations live. Before challenging the monopoly of legitimate violence, it seems to me that JNIM above all seeks to acquire a socially recognized capacity to produce authority in spaces where the state has become intermittent.

Conclusion

In this sense, the real stake may no longer be whether JNIM is capable of building a parallel state, but whether it gradually succeeds in reconfiguring the social conditions of authority production. The production of the state does not proceed solely 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. Every successful mediation, every road reopened, every dispute settled outside public institutions contributes, even unintentionally, to shifting the boundaries of political legitimacy.

From this perspective, the main challenge for Sahelian states likely lies not only in the military reconquest of territories. It consists above all in becoming, in the eyes of populations, the most credible actor to ensure security, render justice, guarantee mobility, and produce a predictable order. The decisive battle being fought today in the Sahel may not first oppose two forces seeking to control a territory. It opposes two competing claims to become, in the eyes of populations, the actor capable of sustainably organizing collective life. In other words, the conflict is less about the monopoly of violence than about the socially recognized capacity to produce authority.