Corridors of Militancy: the Sahel-Sahara Border Regions

The Sahel-Sahara faces a multitude of security challenges. The biggest threats mushroom at the periphery of national boundaries where government writs rarely run. The permeability of borders, along with the proliferation of zones of political vacuums and economic marginalisation in the hinterlands, has transformed border communities into epicentres of radicalised ethnic claims, cross-border militancy, and organized crime. Understanding the dangerous interplay between structural forces like dispossession, region-specific exclusion and group discrimination on the one hand, and the pull exercised by extremist networks and inspirational ideologues on the other, is necessary for tackling the underlying causes of militancy in the Sahel/Saharan border regions.