Overview

International stabilization interventions in so-called fragile states have failed everywhere they have been tried. The United Nation's Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali, for example, recently withdrew at the request of Mali's military government. It left conditions of even greater instability than when the mission was deployed a decade earlier. Far from an outlier, the failure of this mission exposes flaws in the commonsense notion that territorial governance is a necessary foundation for global security. McNeill historicizes and politicizes this assumption, showing how the modern equation of security with territorial control has displaced a diversity of approaches to ordering and securing collective life. In Mali and the broader Sahel, security conditions are shaped by arid ecologies, which have produced distinctive ways of organizing authority, populations, and resources, oriented toward mobility, pluralism, and flexible boundaries. Drawing on historical and anthropological research—as well as data from more than a hundred interviews conducted in Mali, Niger, and the headquarters of AFRICOM—this book situates contemporary dynamics in the Sahel not as disruptions on the margins of international order but as indicators of core problematics shaping security. In the face of these challenges, McNeill models alternative, non-territorial practices of political order and collective security that are highly relevant to rethinking security more broadly, in the Sahel and beyond.

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9781503644267

Table of Contents

Reviews

""Casey McNeill's expertly argued book shows how territorial-centric international relations theory and security policy are incapable of grasping the fluidities of order in much of the world. This book is an elegant entry into Sahelian ontologies that every student of international relations and post-colonial societies can learn from."" --Cecelia Lynch, University of California, Irvine ""This book offers a sophisticated analysis of the Sahel's historical, cultural, political, and military dynamics. While the American military sees the region as an apolitical and ahistorical space to be pacified, Casey McNeill powerfully demonstrates that the Sahel is far from ungoverned space. It is instead populated by people continually making order against all odds."" --Isaac Kamola, Trinity College, Hartford ""Casey McNeill provides the reader with a sophisticated, accessible, and timely discussion of security in West Africa and the Sahel. With its impressive historical breadth and rich empirical work, Mistaking Order for Anarchy explores the complex and shifting linkages between security, territoriality, and spatial imaginaries. An important contribution for scholars of international relations, historians, geographers, and Africanists."" --Kevin Dunn, Hobart and William Smith Colleges

Author Information

Casey McNeill is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Fordham University.

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