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International stabilization interventions in so-called fragile states have failed everywhere they have been tried. In the Sahel, US, French, and United Nations-led missions were recently expelled following a series of military coups d'états. They left conditions of even greater instability than when they were deployed over a decade earlier. Casey McNeill takes these failures as a jumping off point to rethink the spatial logics and imaginaries that ground diagnoses of fragile states and interventions to stabilize them. These have been premised on the assumption 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. This book 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.
"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
"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
"In international relations theory, McNeill argues, Africa is often defined by what it supposedly lacks. This narrative of deficiency has enabled Western international relations scholars to exclude their African counterparts from defining core theoretical concepts and provided justifications for international interventions." —Zachariah Mampilly, Foreign Affairs
1. Ordering Interdependence in the Middle Niger
2. Internationalizing Africa
3. Territorializing the Desert to Secure the Nation
4. Geopolitics and the Malian Crisis
Conclusion