Organized Chaos as Political Agreement, or Violence in the Course of State Disintegration in Mali and Burkina Faso

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to understand the roots of the extreme violence that feeds the “organized chaos” of the latent civil wars currently taking place in Mali and Burkina Faso (West Africa). In these two countries, the protracted civil war appears to be the culmination of a long process of state failure leading to the generalization of a governance through violence. In the course of this process, the nation-state has lost the monopoly of legal violence, which has been privatized by armed ethnic, religious or secessionist rebels. All actors in the war are perpetrating violence against civilians. Military abuses and impunity have become the rule and massive human rights violations have become commonplace. In Mali and Burkina Faso, governance through violence benefits many actors, both national and international, resulting in a general situation of “neither war nor peace” of extreme complexity, which is fairly well reflected in the notion of “organized chaos”.