Knowledges and Practices of the Malian State

The characteristics of the Malian state seem sometimes contradictory, but in the end, they draw a coherent portrait: strong centralisation and politicisation of essential ministries but weak control of administration and the absence of sanctions in the event of serious misdemeanors by government officials, weakness of record-keeping but production of reliable enough statistics, often opaque decision-making processes and weak institutionalisation (justice, parliament), de facto abandonment of territorial administration, etc. Moreover, far from being a stable ensemble, Malian state institutions have gone through significant structural changes during the last decades, which refute the hypothesis of an unchanging trajectory of state formation.

Two dynamics are important for our study. On the one hand, the number of foreign donors has grown spectacularly, with sometimes conflicting policies (those of the Bureau du Vérificateur général [Office of the Auditor General] versus those of the Cour des comptes [Court of Audit], for example) though there has been a growing effort toward coordination over the past years. On the other hand, the tentative state reforms collide with the interests of the political class and of the economic elites. In particular, the question of taxes, decisive from a political point of view more than an economic one, shows a weak rooting of the economic elites within Malian society. These thus do not form a bourgeoisie in the sense of a dominant class oriented toward the reproduction of the social order.

Mali appears to be an ideal-typical case of progressive state withdrawal to the benefit of international actors, of secessionist and Islamist insurrections, of local configurations of power. The collapse of the school sector, with students facing difficulties in mastering French, illustrates the effects of an already enduring withdrawal of the state from the essential sector of education. With around 125,000 civil servants (including military), a majority of which are in Bamako, the Malian state provides limited public services to a small segment of its 20 million inhabitants. For this reason, most of the recent studies on Mali focus on the arrangements at the margins that enable forms of government outside state institutions—informal justice, traditional chiefs, religious authorities. Conversely, the Malian state is hardly covered by recent research, which, for the last few decades, seems to have acted on the state’s growing absence from daily life. The coup d’état carried out by Malian officers in 2020 confirms this perspective by putting the question of governance unambiguously at the centre of the political dynamic. The military’s seizure of power should not conceal that the public protests against the malfunctions of the state are at the origin of the fall of the regime.

This project starts from the hypothesis that the Malian state is the decisive element for thinking about the current crisis, even though the security emergency leads to the privileging of short-term policies which enact or aggravate the failure of state institutions. The observable dynamics are particularly complex: while the entire framework of the state has fallen apart (ministry of education, national police, etc.), certain state institutions, generally linked to foreign funders and cooperation, have become poles of bureaucratic rationalisation. Our hypothesis is that this sectoral rationalisation and non-coordination is an element of the deconstruction of the network of institutions that constitute the state. Our perspective, which aims to complement programmes undertaken elsewhere, takes seriously the structures that are most central to the Malian administration: ministries, senior civil service, audit and inspection organisations, archives and statistical knowledge. These structures, which are relatively little studied, especially as part of a broader institutional configuration, seem to us to be central.