Mali, a country rich with history and culture, but one of the poorest in the world, emerged in the 1990s as one of Africa's most vibrant democracies. Strengthened by bold political and economic reforms at home, Mali has emerged as a leader in African peace keeping efforts. How has such a transition taken place? How have these changes built on Mali's rich heritage? These are the questions that the contributors to this volume have addressed. During the past twenty-five years, the scholarly research and applied development work of Michigan State University faculty and students in Mali represents the most significant combined, long-term, and continuing contribution of any group of university faculty in the United States or Europe to the study of Malian society, economy, and politics. The applied nature of much of this work has resulted in a significant number of working papers, reports, and conference presentations. This volume represents a coherent and connected set of essays from one American university with a widely known and highly respected role in African development. While the essays identify and review Mali's unique historical and contemporary path to democracy and development, they also contribute to the advancement of theoretical knowledge about African development.

This book explores the process by which constitutions and democratic institutions are constructed. Wing focuses on how innovative constitutional dialogues involving participation, negotiation, and recognition of groups previously excluded from political decision-making may be the key to a legitimate constitution.

This book provides the first comprehensive overview of the history of democracy in Africa and explains why the continent's democratic experiments have so often failed, as well as how they could succeed. Nic Cheeseman grapples with some of the most important questions facing Africa and democracy today, including whether international actors should try and promote democracy abroad, how to design political systems that manage ethnic diversity, and why democratic governments often make bad policy decisions. Beginning in the colonial period with the introduction of multi-party elections and ending in 2013 with the collapse of democracy in Mali and South Sudan, the book describes the rise of authoritarian states in the 1970s; the attempts of trade unions and some religious groups to check the abuse of power in the 1980s; the remarkable return of multiparty politics in the 1990s; and finally, the tragic tendency for elections to exacerbate corruption and violence.

An innovative examination of our understanding of political legitimacy in Mali, and its wider implications for democratization and political modernity in the Global South.

Long on the periphery of both academic research and international attention, the countries of the West African Sahel currently find themselves at the center of global concerns over security, terrorism, migration, and conflict. Since the early 1990s the Sahelian states have also been engaged in political struggles over the construction of democratic institutions. Edited by Leonardo A. Villalón and Abdourahmane Idrissa, Democratic Struggle, Institutional Reform, and State Resilience in the African Sahel addresses a key and little-studied question: How have the politics of democratization across the Francophone Sahel shaped processes of state-building, and with what effects on the resilience of state institutions? Starting from the premise that variation in the politics of institution building and institutional reform—although most frequently justified and debated in terms of democratization—have differing impact on the construction of resilient states , this book examines these processes in six francophone states of the Sahel: Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, and Chad. The contributors represent a set of distinguished scholars from across the region, many of whom have also been important actors in the struggles they analyze.

"Primary school enrollment has increased dramatically in Sub-Saharan Africa since democratization in the 1990s. A large theoretical literature in political science identifies education as a tool for democracy and state-building. Schooling Citizens forecasts the effect of expanded access to schooling and the liberalization of educational sectors in Mali by analyzing the relationship between parents and students' educational experiences and their participation in politics. In a landscape of the declining quality of public education and a multitude of accredited private providers, including Islamic, Arabic-language schools, does schooling contribute to citizens' political knowledge and participation? Are all educational institutions equally capable of forming democratic citizens? Bleck's methodologically rigorous research answers these questions and more. Her original survey of 1,000 citizens, which she conducted in Mali before the 2012 coup d'état, explores how different educational experiences, in public/private/informal and Islamic schools, affect citizenship. She looks at the perspectives of both students and parents as social service consumers. The results demonstrate schooling, in any type, plays an important role empowering citizens as democratic agents"--

Despite the decline in the number of military coups since the 1960s and 1970s, Militaries continue to be crucial political actors in many world regions. Their impact on the democratic development of nations, however, has been mixed. On the one hand, coups against democratically elected leaders in Mali (2012), Egypt (2013), and Thailand (2014) have spelled doom for these countries’ nascent democratic regimes and have ushered in new periods of military dominance in politics. The cases of Portugal (1974), the Philippines (1986), and Tunisia (2011), on the other hand, show that the military’s decision not to defend authoritarian leaders against mass protests contributed crucially to the fall of dictatorships and facilitated transitions to democracy. This volume addresses the military’s ambivalent role as "midwife" or "gravedigger" of democracy and highlights the often multi-layered and complex relationship between militaries’ political behaviour and democratization. The chapters were originally published in a special issue of Democratization.

It is two decades since the ‘third wave’ of democratization began to roll across sub-Saharan Africa in the early 1990s. This book provides a very timely investigation into the progress and setbacks over that period, the challenges that remain and the prospects for future democratization in Africa. It commences with an overall assessment of the (lack of) progress made from 1990 to 2010, exploring positive developments with reasons for caution. Based on original research, subsequent contributions examine various themes through country case-studies, inclusive of: the routinisation of elections, accompanied by democratic rollback and the rise of hybrid regimes; the tenacity of presidential powers; the dilemmas of power-sharing; ethnic voting and rise of a violent politics of belonging; the role of ‘donors’ and the ambiguities of ‘democracy promotion’. Overall, the book concludes that steps forward remain greater than reversals and that typically, though not universally, sub-Saharan African countries are more democratic today than in the late 1980s. Nonetheless, the book also calls for more meaningful processes of democratization that aim not only at securing civil and political rights, but also socio-economic rights and the physical security of African citizens. This book was originally published as a special issue of Democratization

The Mali crisis provoked by the coup d'état of March 2012 led to the collapse of the democratic Malian state, a jihadist Al Qaida take-over of North Mali, and the return of the French Foreign Legion to the Sahara after 54 years of Malian Independence. With 12,000 UN peacekeepers (MINUSMA) and the election of President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita in August 2013, the prospects for peace and democracy in Mali looked brighter ... until IBK'e exhausted regime was overthrown in the coup of August 2020. What mechanisms exist within Malian society and its social capital that might build a sustainable peace economy? How can women mobilize family networks to promote peace and to create employment? Will their efforts avert another round of civil war in 2025 or 2030? Mali suffers from two related crises, and the 2015 peace negotiations with Tuareg and Arab armed movements address the lesser of the two. In fact the crisis in North Mali has been largely provoked by the failure of the State, by a combination of dire poverty, galloping demography, bad governance and questionable legitimacy in a Nation State that has been corrupted by military rule for most of its short existence. The core crisis is in Bamako, the capital city.This book highlights major international themes such as democratic governance, decentralization and political legitimacy; "terrorism" and Islamic fundamentalism; and great power resource-rivalry over oil, gas and uranium lying under the Sahara Desert. Mali is a victim of corporate desires for mineral extraction, but also of cocaine trafficking from South America and a struggle for the leadership of Sunni Islam, all of which have helped undermine Mali's fragile, secular institutions. The Tuareg revolt of the 1990s and the arrival of Malian democracy have been described in detail, but no one has yet told the full story of Mali in the early 21st century-explaining why democracy collapsed, where the Arab jihadists came from, and why France went to war against Al Qaida in the Sahel and in the Islamic Maghreb-a security zone that Europeans neglect at their peril.Our story should have ended optimistically after the election of Mr. Ibrahim Boubacar Keita as Mali's new President, sworn in on September 4th 2013-and the impending trial of the Malian coup leader for the murder of rival soldiers, a plot line filled with mass graves and questions about American and British and French complicity with Algeria and Al Qaida. Instead, events during 2014 and 2020 have raised more questions than answers. While we offer recipes for peace building and routes towards peace and sustainable development, the continuing stories of cocaine mafias, Mali's local corruption and its venal international partners push us towards a pessimistic conclusion.The book includes 12 short "conversations" with Malian political figures, mediators and well-informed commentators. This "multi-voice" format allows our book to offer a range of interpretations for the dramatic events in Mali 2012-2015. We do not necessarily agree with the views expressed in all these conversations, and this gives them extra value.