How JNIM is capturing state functions in Mali’s Mourdiah and Nara

On June 24, 2026, traffic resumed on the strategic axis linking Bamako to Mourdiah and Nara, in central-western Mali, after weeks of blockade imposed by JNIM (Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin). More than the reopening of the road itself, it is the way it happened that draws attention. The return to circulation was not achieved through a decisive military operation by the state, but through mediations conducted by local notables and community actors with the jihadist group.

This episode alone invites a reconsideration of certain analytical frameworks of Sahelian conflict. It suggests that the dynamics of conflict are no longer limited to a series of offensives, withdrawals, or territorial conquests. They also play out in the ability to open or close a road, ensure continuity of trade, influence mobility, or condition the ordinary functioning of collective life. In other words, the center of gravity of competition seems to be shifting. The question may no longer be just who controls a territory, but 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 reread recent developments in JNIM’s strategy and, more broadly, transformations in war and the production of authority in the Sahelian margins.

I. From territorial conquest to conquest of functions

What is changing in the Sahel today is perhaps not only the geography of war; it is its objective. Competition seems increasingly less about durable territorial conquest and more about the control of functions that allow a society to operate. This shift is far from trivial. It invites us to move our focus: 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 integrated into its repertoire road blockades, circulation restrictions, supply interdictions, controls on trade routes, and pressure on the main corridors linking Bamako to Kayes, Nioro-du-Sahel, Segou, and Mourdiah. 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 shift. For a long time, war in the Sahel was understood through a mapping of controlled territories, conquered localities, or lost and regained military positions. That reading remains relevant, but it becomes insufficient to understand the current transformations of the conflict. JNIM now pushes further a logic seen in several contemporary forms of insurgency: control of functions progressively 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, ensuring continuity of trade, protecting supply chains, delivering 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 who controls a territory, but who is able to ensure its functioning.

It is precisely on this ground that JNIM seems to shift the confrontation. The movement does not necessarily seek to directly administer the territories where it is present. Instead, it appears to invest in the functions that make the state socially indispensable, while leaving the costs of daily administration to the state. I call this process a functional capture of the state: a strategy by which an armed actor seeks not so much to exercise complete territorial sovereignty but to appropriate the functions that, in the eyes of populations, constitute the concrete usefulness of the state. Roads are undoubtedly the most visible expression of this transformation. They cease to be simple transport infrastructure and become true political institutions. Closing them, reopening them, filtering goods, taxing trade flows, or conditioning the mobility of populations amounts to exercising prerogatives traditionally associated with public authority. From this perspective, controlling a road is no longer just about controlling space; it is about controlling the economic and social interactions that cross that space.

This shift from control of territories to control of flows is, in my view, one of the most significant strategic mutations in the Sahel war. 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 transforms.

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 indicate adherence to JNIM’s political project. It mainly reflects the constraints faced by populations whose survival depends on reopening roads, accessing markets, and continuity of trade. In these circumstances, negotiation stems less from political preference than from 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 share the same interests or 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 is 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 reinforce each other.

The Sahelian spaces precisely illustrate this interweaving. The state’s authority constantly interacts with traditional legitimacies, embodied by customary chiefs, religious authorities, and local notables, but also with a legitimacy that JNIM progressively seeks to build. This legitimacy does not primarily rest on the personal charisma of its leaders. It proceeds more from its capacity to produce concrete order, to quickly adjudicate disputes, to secure certain routes, to regulate markets, or to sanction behaviors it deems deviant. This is not, strictly speaking, charismatic authority in the Weberian sense. Rather, JNIM tends to build what could be called performative legitimacy: a legitimacy that derives neither from institutional status, nor 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 go even further. What JNIM seems to seek is not so much the immediate conquest of the state apparatus but its progressive functional disempowerment, particularly in territorial margins where state presence remains discontinuous. By investing in the concrete functions that structure people’s daily lives — securing movements, arbitrating conflicts, regulating trade, or organizing access to resources — it does not replace the state; it progressively shifts the center of gravity. The challenge 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 populations live. Before contesting the monopoly of legitimate violence, JNIM seems mainly to seek 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 is able to build a parallel state, but whether it progressively manages to reconfigure 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 the one who guarantees security, organizes trade, arbitrates conflicts, and makes collective life predictable. Each successful mediation, each road reopened, each dispute resolved outside public institutions contributes, even unintentionally, to shifting the boundaries of political legitimacy.

From this perspective, the main challenge for Sahelian states is probably not solely the military reconquest of territories. It consists above all in becoming, in the eyes of populations, the most credible actor to ensure security, deliver justice, guarantee mobility, and produce predictable order. The decisive battle unfolding today in the Sahel may not primarily 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.