Azawad’s Facebook Warriors

Acknowledgments

Introduction

ON JANUARY 17, 2012, fighters affiliated with a group called the Mouvement national de libération de l’Azawad (MNLA) attacked army outposts around the city of Ménaka^* in northeastern Mali. The MNLA, founded several months previously, was dominated by ethnic Tuaregs,^† a traditionally nomadic people found across a wide swath of the Sahara and Sahel regions of northwestern Africa. In Mali, various Tuareg groups had launched three previous armed rebellions against the Malian government since Mali won independence from France in 1960.^‡ ←1 | 2→However, the MNLA’s rebellion was radically different from its predecessors in at least two main respects. First, it was the first Tuareg-led rebellion to insist on the outright independence of Mali’s vast but sparsely populated northern region (as the state of Azawad), and the MNLA claimed to advocate on behalf of not just Tuaregs but of all allegedly marginalized populations in northern Mali/Azawad.^§ Second, and perhaps more importantly, it was the first Tuareg-led rebellion in which the rebels attempted to carry their messages to national, regional, and international audiences via the Internet. In their media campaigns, MNLA officials and supporters utilized both traditional and social media; on social media, Facebook was the MNLA’s platform of choice.

At the onset of the armed rebellion in January 2012, the task before the MNLA was daunting. To have any hope of realizing its goal of a recognized, sovereign nation-state of Azawad, the MNLA would have to achieve military dominance at least over the territory it claimed as part of its state-to-be, an area larger than France. That would be just the beginning, though. Mali was an ally of the United States and France, and Western powers, then and now, do not have a track record of supporting secessionist movements against allies—South Sudan and Eritrea, two African states that managed to achieve independence through force of arms, were carved out of distinctly anti-Western states.¹ To have any hope of achieving sufficient military dominance to make Azawad a de facto reality and achieving sufficient international acceptance to make Azawad a de jure state, the MNLA would have to do something even more challenging. The MNLA’s ideology represented something that had never been seen in the territory before, seeking to cut across traditional ethnic and tribal linkages to forge the disparate peoples of the territory into a modern nation-state. To borrow a concept from Benedict Anderson, to have any chance of succeeding in its struggle, the MNLA needed to successfully create a new imagined political community—one in which members were not tied to each other through traditional ethnic and tribal linkages but felt a sense of shared identity and solidarity nonetheless.² To add another layer of complexity, this enterprise of community construction could not be limited to the physical territory the MNLA claimed for the state of Azawad. Instead, even before the MNLA’s ←2 | 3→formal founding, the movement was transnational: almost all of the MNLA’s top echelon of leaders and thinkers had spent significant amounts of time outside the territory claimed as Azawad, and the MNLA made conscious efforts to root itself among various diaspora communities in Africa, Europe, and throughout the rest of the world. This book focuses on a sub-section of the transnational community constituted by its members’ support for the MNLA and its struggle for an independent Azawadian nation-state, the pro-MNLA Facebook community.

Ultimately, the MNLA largely failed to accomplish each of these three necessary steps. On the ground in Azawad, the MNLA was militarily defeated by Al Qaeda-linked Islamist forces in May 2012 and would never again regain its military preeminence after the Islamists were chased underground by a French and Chadian-led military intervention in January 2013. Internationally, no other state recognized the state of Azawad following the MNLA’s declaration of independence in April 2012, and in the years since, even the MNLA has formally agreed to work within a political framework underlined by the territorial integrity of Mali. Finally, although it has attracted less international and scholarly attention than the previous two aspects, the MNLA failed in its enterprise to create a new imagined political community in Azawad. Traditional ethnic and tribal ties, never absent, reasserted themselves with a vengeance and once again dominate not just the nexus of guns, money, and political power in northern Mali/Azawad but also rhetoric on the part of an increasing number of local leaders.

If the MNLA failed to achieve its goals, why is it worthy of extended study? First, in the short term, the MNLA remains crucial for the future of northern Mali/Azawad. Azawad may not be becoming an independent state, but the MNLA retains significant political and military power in the territory and, as a major member of the peace process since 2015, retains, at the very least, de facto veto power over peace and development in the area. Understanding the MNLA and its ideology in its own words, a key goal of this book, is thus vital to restoring peace to the region. Second, in the long term, the MNLA’s political ideas and, more broadly, aspirations for the peoples of northern Mali/Azawad will endure even if the MNLA has not managed to weave the social fabric of Azawad into a new imagined community. As will be explored in subsequent chapters, previous armed rebellions in northern Mali influenced future generations of activists and fighters, and the rebellion spearheaded by the MNLA has already had an impact far greater than any previous rebellion. Many in northern Mali/Azawad are old enough to remember Mali’s independence in 1960 and the first northern rebellion in 1963. Many more will remember the MNLA, its leaders, and its ideas, for decades. Whatever the future has in store for northern Mali/Azawad, the MNLA, its ideas, and its aspirations will be present through popular memory. Third and ←3 | 4→most importantly for this book, the MNLA’s social media outreach campaign far beyond the borders of northern Mali/Azawad makes the movement worthy of scholarly attention. The idea that social media has changed the ways in which politics are and will be practiced is widely accepted. Until now, however, almost all scholarly studies of the use of social media by political movements have focused on nonviolent movements, mass mobilizing movements, or borderless terrorist groups. The MNLA, as a centrally organized, non-mass mobilizing, non-terrorist, territorially focused yet not territorially restricted (in participation or audience) group that made extensive, conscious use of social media, represents a unique species in the political aquarium.³ Studying the MNLA thus contributes to scholarly understanding of the ever-more diverse ways in which social media is harnessed by political movements.

The Book’s Timeframe of Study

The period with which this book is concerned is from the beginning of 2012 through the end of 2015. Although the MNLA’s military rebellion started on January 17, 2012, it does not have a neat endpoint. By April 2012, the MNLA had defeated the Malian army in northern Mali/Azawad to the point that the MNLA formally declared Azawad’s independence on April 6. However, in June, the MNLA was in turn militarily defeated by a collection of Islamist groups with ties to Al Qaeda, who took effective control of Azawad. The threat posed by these groups to central and southern Mali eventually prompted a French-led international military intervention in January 2013, forcing the Islamist groups underground and allowing the MNLA to make a partial resurgence. However, the international intervention, which resulted in a lasting French and United Nations troop presence on the ground in northern Mali/Azawad, was quickly followed by the start of a formal peace process between the MNLA and the Malian government. After two years of negotiations and sporadic fighting, in June 2015, the MNLA (by now part of an umbrella organization of pro-Azawadian secession groups), the Malian government, and a collection of anti-secession groups signed the Agreement for Peace and Reconciliation. In the Agreement for Peace and Reconciliation, the MNLA formally agreed to respect the territorial integrity of the state of Mali, meaning that the MNLA’s goal of Azawadian independence was, on paper at least, no more. However, the MNLA openly continued to harbor separatist aspirations. Furthermore, the Agreement for Peace and Reconciliation did not spell the end of fighting between the signatory groups in northern Mali/Azawad or any kind of improvement in the security climate of the area. Thus, the ←4 | 5→Agreement for Peace and Reconciliation is not entirely suitable as an end point for the MNLA’s rebellion. At time of writing, the peace process, now focused on implementing the Agreement, continues at a slow and inconsistent pace, and the MNLA remains a crucial player, both politically and militarily, in northern Mali/Azawad. As a result, any end point chosen for a study of the MNLA will inevitably be arbitrary. Choosing the close of 2015 as the endpoint of this book’s survey of the pro-MNLA Facebook community attempts to acknowledge that the Agreement for Peace and Reconciliation did represent a major shift in the military and political conflict in northern Mali/Azawad while at the same time capturing the fact that many of the conflict’s chief points of contention were not settled with the Agreement.

The Book’s Layout

This book aims to examine how MNLA communications officials and other MNLA supporters used Facebook as a public-facing platform during the period from January 2012 through December 2015. It takes both quantitative and qualitative approaches. Quantitatively, it draws on a newly created dataset of Facebook posts by both MNLA communications officials and other MNLA supporters to explore types of content posted by public MNLA-linked Facebook accounts and how their patterns of posting responded to offline events of relevance to the MNLA. Qualitatively, it draws on textual analysis of select Facebook posts to examine the predominant narrative frames constructed and activated by pro-MNLA Facebook posters during this period, as well as key symbolic visual motifs in images and videos posted by pro-MNLA Facebook users.