This panel aims to revisit how identity and politics interact in the West African Sahel as states, societies, and regional institutions face a period of profound rupture. Following successive coups in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, the region has entered a critical juncture marked by shifting politics, such as new civil-military relations, contested regional integration initiatives, and a surge in border violence and extremist attacks. We explore how identity is being reconfigured as a political resource in the context of the post-coup Sahel, and how religious, civic, and regional identities have become a central idiom through which legitimacy, sovereignty, and belonging are renegotiated. Bringing together perspectives from borderland and mobility research, religion-state relations, and post-coup civic narratives, this panel traces how competing political projects redefine insiders and outsiders. Regional organisations such as ECOWAS and AES continue to mobilise contrasting visions of integration and citizenship, while sanctions and border controls reshape mobility and legal belonging. At the same time, debates over religion, morality, and local authority have become increasingly central to projects of sovereignty and refoundation. In this context, both states and non-state actors seek to reposition religion as a source of legitimacy, moral order, and social cohesion, thereby reshaping state-society relations. By situating identity politics within broader geopolitical realignments and institutional reconfigurations, this panel demonstrates that the Sahel is not merely a site of crisis but a space of political reconfiguration. In doing so, it shows how different actors reimagine this regional order in a shifting world.
Please submit abstracts to Amalie Weinrich (aweinrich@cris.unu.edu) by September 6.
