This chapter treats Mauritania as a counter-case that shows how state policies can, in specific circumstances, prevent jihadists from building major local coalitions. Mauritania experienced several significant jihadist attacks between 2005 and 2011 as well as some jihadist recruitment for actions at home and abroad. Yet since 2011, jihadist violence in Mauritania has almost completely fallen off. A “mutaraka” (mutual leaving alone) has arisen between Mauritania and al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), reflecting a tacit agreement between the Mauritanian state and the Sahara’s jihadists, as well as a tacit understanding between the Mauritanian state and young Mauritanian radicals. These understandings revolve around the state’s non-intervention in northern Mali, the state’s willingness to tolerate strident preaching against democracy and liberalism, the state’s relatively soft treatment of local radicals since 2010, and the state’s abandonment of the use of torture against dissident clerics.

This chapter examines the fraught relationship between jihadism in central Mali and an ethnic group, the Peul, that has simultaneously furnished numerous recruits to the jihadists and become a target of collective punishment by the state. The jihadists in central Mali and those in northern Mali, beginning formally in 2017 but informally several years earlier, were part of the same organization. Yet the political approach taken by jihadists in the center differed substantially from that taken by their peers in the north; in particular, jihadists in the center cultivated a starker “ethnicizing” discourse but were simultaneously less interested than their northern counterparts in drawing local politicians into their coalition. The chapter analyzes how Peul politicians have responded to the jihadist leader Amadou Kouffa, highlighting ways in which shared religion and ethnicity provided common ground for communication but ultimately not for compromise, let alone coalition-building. The chapter argues that central Mali represents a case of jihadist coalition-building that, by its implicitly anti-elite stance, offers substantial possibilities for grassroots recruitment while simultaneously foreclosing the possibility of absorbing some of the most important political blocs on the scene.

This chapter examines coalition politics within the Salafi Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC). As the GSPC transitioned into al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), debates arose about the wisdom of aligning with al-Qaida. Moreover, as the GSPC/AQIM effected a “Saharan turn,” the organization’s decentralization and the ambitions of particular Saharan field commanders led to serious debates about strategy. Only some of these debates could be definitively resolved, resulting in a high degree of variation within a single organization. At the same time, leading figures in the GSPC/AQIM sought to use religious language and concepts to maintain a semblance of unity in their coalition. AQIM developed a sophisticated legal body, partly in order to maintain cohesion and to attempt to reinforce the central leadership’s power over independent-minded field commanders. The chapter argues that jihadist coalitions can avoid destructive schisms by empowering field commanders and tolerating a high level of dissent from them, but that this strategy has substantial costs in terms of the central leadership’s ability to impose a singular vision on subordinates.

This chapter investigates the political career of a small Islamic State affiliate operating in this border zone. These jihadists have benefited not just from the stereotypical “porous border” but also from the way that complex conflicts in this region exacerbate animosity between ethnic groups and between civilian populations and national states. This animosity creates openings for jihadists to implicate themselves in local politics and for local communities to use jihadism as a weapon in local politics. The chapter argues, however, that the “Islamic State in the Greater Sahara (ISGS)” exemplifies the case of a coalition whose horizons are limited precisely because its religious messaging is highly underdeveloped. Even as ISGS finds some recruits and achieves some military and propaganda victories, such as ambushing a patrol of American and Nigerien soldiers in 2017, ISGS has struggled to build a serious political coalition and therefore may remain, ironically, a partial satellite of its ostensible rival al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM).

The Introduction lays out the analytical approach of the book, namely a focus on understanding jihadism at the meso level by examining the behaviors and perspectives of jihadist field commanders. This approach contrasts with macro-level approaches that foreground global doctrines and movements, and also contrasts with micro-level approaches that highlight issues of individual radicalization. The Introduction argues that at the meso level, politics and religion work differently for jihadists than at the macro level. At the meso level, politics is less about implementing one-size-fits-all ideologies and is more about building coalitions and managing relationships, while religion is less about one-size-fits-all theologies and more about generating narratives that explain and give meaning to fast-moving events and improvised decisions. It also provides context for understanding the local and regional dynamics of jihadism in the Sahel and North Africa.

This chapter tells the story of shifting jihadist coalitions within Algeria’s civil war in the 1990s. The Armed Islamic Group (GIA) initially built a broad coalition comprising veterans of Afghanistan, veterans of an earlier domestic Algerian insurgency, local hardliners, and other armed groups that the GIA drew in. Yet at the peak of coalition-building, the death of a unifying figure set the stage for bitter infighting as the local hardliners began to exclude and even kill the leaders of other coalition blocs. Eventually, the GIA fragmented along ideological but also geographical lines, with regional field commanders revolting against the clique of leaders from Algiers and nearby Blida. The GIA splinter organization the Salafi Group for Preaching and Combat (French acronym GSPC) represented the reaction of field commanders, who wished to move away from internal purges and civilian massacres and back to fighting the Algerian state.

This chapter describes shifting coalitions in northern Mali, especially in the critical phase of 2012–2013, when al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) deepened a remarkable set of alliances with local politicians. These “circumstantial jihadists” had a temporary but real effect on the character of the jihadist movement in northern Mali in 2012, positioning the jihadist coalition as a kind of “jihadism lite” that was open to negotiations with regional governments. Even after they left the jihadist camp in 2013 amid France’s military intervention, these elites may have continued to play a role in the trajectory of jihadism in the region, as rumors circulate that they remain in contact with jihadists operating in the shadows. The chapter argues that jihadists built a wide coalition in northern Mali in 2012 by offering political resources to local politicians, but that this coalition was doomed to fracture precisely because it was so diverse.

The Conclusion draws out the analytical and policy implications of the book, concentrating on the ways that collective punishment by states allows jihadists to expand their ranks. The Conclusion also argues that the War on Terror needs to be fundamentally rethought, and that dialogue with jihadists might be viable.

This chapter analyzes how jurisprudence has supplied the language of dispute between rival jihadist factions in Libya. The chapter focuses on the northeastern coastal city of Derna, where al-Qada in the Islamic Maghreb's (AQIM’s) loose allies battled an Islamic State affiliate in 2014–2015. In Derna, jihadists first attempted to settle their differences through legal procedures, but soon had recourse to violence against one another. The case of Derna vividly exemplifies how jihadist jurisprudence attempts to grapple with rapidly shifting contexts and to provide and assess ex-post facto justifications for field commanders’ improvised decisions. Fiqh, moreover, can sometimes sharpen rather than resolve disputes, particularly when it is weaponized by hardliners against internal rivals. The chapter argues that intra-jihadist rifts in Libya reveal wider dynamics about the limits of competing strategies for jihadist coalition-building: more pragmatic strategies can alienate hardliners, but hardliners alienate civilians.Jihadists’ inability to sustain a cohesive coalition left them vulnerable to stronger factions within a multi-party civil war.