UC Berkeley

This dissertation considers the proliferation of security interventions in the West African Sahel led by the European Union, United States, and various United Nations agencies. I argue that the region has become a privileged site in the making of novel forms of security expertise, which assemble an ever-expanding range of events as actionable threats. I investigate how a diverse series of challenges—political violence, terrorism, trafficking, migration, anthropogenic climate change—are drawn together under a governing rubric of security. Amid invocations in the popular press and scholarly literature about numerous looming global catastrophes, my project considers how security emerges as a form of expert knowledge marshaled to govern catastrophe. Through a mix of ethnographic and archival methods situated in three regional nodes— Dakar, Senegal; Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso; and Niamey, Niger—my project empirically locates contemporary security expertise within the particular geo-histories of the Sahel. While several accounts of contemporary security interventions in the region are quick to write these developments exclusively into a post-9/11 counterterrorism lineage that begins in the early 2000s in the Middle East and East Africa and effectively expands outward into West Africa in subsequent years, my dissertation seeks to empirically trace a different genealogy of security practice. I treat security interventions in the Sahel as polyvalent practices, presently concerned with terrorism and organized crime, while simultaneously informed by a range of deeper anxieties about arid and semi-arid spaces. My research demonstrates how intertwined geopolitical and environmental imaginaries are refashioning the Sahel as a geographic site in need of continuous foreign-led monitoring, surveillance, and security.