Technical report “Sahelian youth: dynamics of exclusion, means of integration”, 2016

23/03/2016

For twenty years now, the Sahel region has been marked by rising insecurity, political crises, and poorly controlled flows of people, arms and illegal goods, with a major risk of States becoming destabilized. In the wake of the war in Libya and the Malian crisis, causes, arms, and combatants have been increasingly crossing borders, leading to an expansion of unsafe zones. These different forms of violence, including terrorism, are deployed in very diverse contexts, but nonetheless have common characteristics in that they cause States to lose their legitimacy in the eyes of their populations, who are typically very young and inexperienced and the main targets for recruitment by criminal networks and radical groups.