SOAS Research Online

Abstract

Over the past two decades, the Mediterranean and the Sahelo-Sahara have seen levels of violence that are unprecedented in the recent history of these two regions. While the Mediterranean was converted into a mass grave post-2015, the Sahel has become home to mass civilian fatalities and displacement triggered by an evolving counterinsurgency campaign. This chapter conceptualises the mass violence, death and instability that mark both the Mediterranean and the Sahelo-Sahara as manifestations of a collapse in European hegemony across these regions. This breakdown creates openings to view what is typically obscured in times of unchallenged hegemony. The chapter highlights two such openings. The first concerns an expanded geography of the Sahelo-Sahara and the Mediterranean and the second a reconnected history of these two regions. The former means countering a colonial geography that treats the Mediterranean and the Sahelo-Sahara as distinct and discretely bounded entities. The latter, meanwhile, traces this colonial geography’s genealogy, relaying the precolonial co-constitution of these two regions and the gradual shift toward asymmetry generated by the emergence of a new world-systemic centre in the Atlantic at the turn of the fifteenth century. In light of this expanded geography and reconnected history, contemporary border violence in the Mediterranean and political violence in the Sahel each appear to be symptoms of the breakdown in Europe’s exclusive dominance over the Global South.