Education Amid Stabilization: The Varied Effects of Military Intervention on Public Schooling in Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso

At the intersection of international relations, comparative politics, and war consequence studies, this paper seeks to evaluate the effects of supportive foreign military intervention on education provision in three neighboring Central Sahel countries: Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso. In the wake of a Tuareg insurgency and a 2012 coup d’état in Mali, the proliferation of jihadist violence in the tri-border Liptako-Gourma region has been met by a proliferation of foreign interveners. Does stabilization— the form of intervention in the Central Sahel— improve education provision, as measured by diminishing jihadist attacks on schools and school closures due to violence? This paper hypothesizes that where there is a larger scale of intervention, there is more security— and thus an environment more conducive to education provision. Although insecurity in the three Central Sahel countries has shared origins, each country has a distinct scale of intervention. In placing Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso on a spectrum of stabilization (from largest- to smallest-scale), this paper conducts a comparative test to determine how intervention affects education provision. Qualitative and quantitative data analyses reveal that, while a larger scale of intervention (in Mali) guarantees neither better security nor more favorable education provision, the absence of intervention (in Burkina Faso) facilitates unfavorable security and education outcomes. This paper concludes that destabilizing security-centric conceptions of stabilization may lead to more lasting peace and more accessible education in the Central Sahel and beyond.