ABSTRACT
In the run up to the Mali War of 2012–2013, the ongoing destabilization of the North and West Africa meta-region accelerated. This destabilization began to manifest itself in extreme versions of certain social and economic features that had been developing for some time. In particular, this chapter will discuss extreme versions of the contraband traffic that had long been an economic feature of the Sahara-Sahel zone, as well as extreme forms of Islam, which had also been slowly developing from Algeria to Nigeria over the past decades. Two sub-regions of the North and West Africa meta-region will be examined for the purposes of this discussion: the Algeria-Mali border regions, long a seat of contraband and smuggling, and northern Nigeria, which had been the locus of extremist forms of Islam, including violent outbursts, at least since the 1980s. In the Algeria-Mali borderlands, we will examine the rise of organized criminal networks that developed out of the widespread contraband traffic that had long flourished in the region. The cocaine trade, clearly an extreme version of the regional contraband traffic, became a critical component of this organized criminality. In the case of cocaine traffic, we are dealing with a commodity that is in and of itself illegal, as opposed to much of the regional contraband traffic in previous decades, which focused on the smuggling of what were for the most part otherwise legal commodities, such as foodstuffs, cigarettes, vehicles, and building materials. 1 Two factors had rendered the traffic in these otherwise legal commodities illegal. The first was the presence of artificial borders thrown up in colonial times and jealously maintained in the post-independence period by the national states that grew out of the former French colonies. 2 The second factor was the economic policies, including subsidies, in those national states that controlled prices on different sides of the borders, thus creating artificial price differentials that could be exploited by those willing to flaunt the regulations and customs enforcement. 3 South American cocaine, on the other hand, was and is completely illegal in all the countries involved, not to mention virtually unknown, until recently, in North and West Africa.
