Featuring Rahmane Idrissa on Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso. The region has been beset by jihadist insurgencies and, in the case of Mali and Burkina Faso, recent military coups. This is a comprehensive interview that puts the present conflict—which has drawn in French military and then Russian mercenary intervention—into deep historical and political-economic context from struggles over the slave trade, through French colonialism, to the neocolonial imposition of neoliberalism.

Idrissa’s work:

newleftreview.org/issues/ii132/articles/rahmane-idrissa-the-sahel-a-cognitive-mapping

newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/kabores-defeat

nybooks.com/daily/2022/05/25/potent-policies-of-empire

lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n04/rahmane-idrissa/coup-contrecoup

lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n23/rahmane-idrissa/countries-without-currency

Special outro music from Ali Farka Touré.

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Check out Inside the Second Wave of Feminism: haymarketbooks.org/books/1887-inside-the-second-wave-of-feminism