In a context where security threats dominate political and media accounts in West Africa, some actors have imposed themselves as essential votes – but not without controversy. Through this contribution, we question the approach and productions of the Timbuktu Institute, led by Bacary Samb, whose reports with a high alarmist raise serious questions of method, transparency and intellectual ethics. This is a call for rigor, faced with a field where approximation can be expensive.
The Timbuktu Institute, led by Dr. Bacary Samb, has established himself for more than a decade as a major player in the field of prevention of violent extremism in West Africa. Its numerous publications, media interventions and workshops with security institutions make it a reference in the public sphere. However, attentive reading of its relationships reveals a series of deep gaps in terms of scientific rigor, as well as a constant tendency to alarmism, out of step with the expected academic standards.
The most recent report entitled “The threat of JNIM in the three borders of Mali, Mauritania and Senegal” perfectly illustrates this orientation. It is advanced that Jama’at Nasr al-Islam Wal Muslimin (Jnim), affiliated with Al-Qaeda, intensifies its presence in this strategic border area by exploiting local weaknesses (community tensions, migratory flows, absence of the state). The report even claims to detect a “silent infiltration” of the Senegalese territory, and calls for increased vigilance in the face of this threat.
However, several fundamental elements undermine the credibility of this document. First, the tone is clearly alarmist. He summons expressions loaded with emotion (“increasing threat”, “latent presence”, “insidious infiltration”) which are more of militant rhetoric than of distant, scientific analysis. As proof, none of these claims is based on verifiable data: no field observations, no identifiable primary sources, no maintenance with local players. The expression “latent presence”, for example, cited in southeast Senegal, is not supported by any factual element.
Then, the report is distinguished by a total absence of methodological rigor. No research protocol is exposed, no bibliography or theoretical framework is mobilized. Readers remain expectant as to how the data has been collected (if they were), analyzed, or crossed with other works. This defect is recurrent in the publications of the Institute, which are characterized by a certain methodological vagueness and a narrative rather than scientific presentation.
In addition, the perspective adopted is overhanging and disembodied. Community realities, local adaptation logics, forms of community self -regulation in the face of violence, are ignored. No place is reserved for customary chiefdoms, local religious leaders, young people or women, however at the heart of social dynamics in the border areas concerned. In this, the report renews a binary representation of the territory: on the one hand, “healthy” areas (or let’s say “holy”!); on the other, “infiltrated” areas. Such a dichotomy evacuates gray areas, negotiation and resilience spaces.
This bias is part of a more general posture that is found in several texts carried by Dr Bacary Samb, founder of the Timbuktu Institute. For several years, the latter has adopted a militant public position on questions of radicalization, often through stands, media interviews, and publications, where religious concern, security emergency, and political discourse mixes. This orientation results in confusion between prevention activism and scientific approach, at the risk of sacrificing the complexity of the field on the altar of media efficiency.
The case of the Bounkani report in Côte d’Ivoire (2021) reinforces this observation. Again, the emphasis is placed on the risks of radicalization, without understanding the deep springs. No analysis of religious sectors, individual journeys or local development policies is presented. The discourse is based on projected fears, not on diagnoses made. It is not a question of denying the real risks linked to the extension of extremist violence to the Gulf of Guinea, but of recalling that their analysis must rely on reliable, contextualized, crossed data, to avoid dangerous shortcuts.
This posture is, in reality, the very DNA of Dr. Samb’s interventions, which we used to listen to an amused air, a smile at the corner of the lips, as its rave logorrhees swarm on the radio and televised sets. As soon as a microphone is tense, it starts without gloves, without restraint, and especially without nuance. In his last outing on RFI, following the publication of the JNIM threat, questioned about the attempts at jihadist infiltration in the east of Senegal, especially in the Bakel area, he launches, without even making a break to breathe:
-“Precisely, in this region of eastern Senegal, the main element of ideological resilience, namely the presence of Sufi brotherhoods, is less … This area is dominated by the presence of a Salafist Islam increasingly reinforced by the networks of migration, with populations which are gone to Europe and who have had contacts with the Salafist circles and who are just building Salafist mosques Traditional Islam and delegitimize local religious leaders, compared to their unclear position on slavery by ancestry in the Bakel region precisely. »»
A declaration that is both precipitated, caricatured and socially explosive, without empirical anchoring, but with high media value – which seems, alas, the essential in its approach.
Another layer, and not least, surrounds the Timbuktu Institute: that of its sources of funding. Reading its reports, as on its official website, no explicit mention is made of donors, institutional supports, nor financial partnerships which financially support its research, advocacy or communication activities. This financial opacity, in flagrant contradiction with the principles of transparency, becomes all the more worrying since its productions regularly feed security narratives aligned with the interests of certain governments or international organizations. Follow my gaze. The lack of clarity on the origin of the funds therefore raises legitimate questions: who finances the Timbuktu Institute? For what purpose? And above all, what influences can these financial flows exert on the content, the tone and the angles chosen in his analyzes? At a time when the requirement of ethics, independence and traceability is a vital minimum in research, this silence has a weight. It is not only disturbing, but also fundamentally incompatible with elementary standards of intellectual and public accountability.
It is still necessary to recognize that this opacity does not concern that the Timbuktu Institute: it refers to a wider structural problem with which many African think tanks face. In the absence of substantial public funding or sustainable local patronage, many research institutes depend almost exclusively on international donors – often Western – to ensure their operation. This financial dependence also has a weight: it can orient thematic priorities, model product discourses and condition the degree of alignment with the security reading grids promoted by partners. Ultimately, this raises the elementary question of intellectual autonomy. What is a speech produced under influence worth? How to build an African strategic thinking if the issues are dictated by the donor agenda? In this, transparency on funding sources is not a matter of formality, but a political issue of sovereignty.
Moreover, the influence of the Timbuktu Institute in media and political circles is such that its publications are often perceived as authority. However, their low scientific value should encourage caution. It is regrettable that the orientation bodies of public security and prevention of radicalization are based on this type of work, instead of mobilizing universities, independent research centers.
This observation calls for a necessary distinction between activism and scientificity. Where the first seeks to produce a shock effect to orient policies, the second endeavors to deconstruct, contextualize, explain, put into perspective. It is possible, and even desirable, that institutes like Timbuktu produce expertise. But this expertise cannot be considered reliable as long as it is not subject to rules of transparency, method, and refutability.
It is time for African academics to grab these questions with rigor, nuance, and independence. Faced with the complexity of the dynamics of violent extremism, it is no longer enough to produce anxiety -provoking speeches: it is necessary to produce verifiable knowledge, built with the actors on the ground, and capable of sustainably illuminating political choices.
It is therefore not simply a question of criticizing a man, an institute or more report, but of making a fundamental requirement: that of intellectual and scientific responsibility in a field as sensitive as that of security. Because by confusing communication, expertise and media faith, we end up weakening the real struggles, discrediting the serious actors, and blurring the fracture lines which would require on the contrary precision, rigor and discernment. Security cannot only be left to opinion makers. It must be enlightened by solid knowledge, produced with, since then, and for the companies concerned. Otherwise, it is not only the science that we betray – It is peace itself that we compromise.
Thierno bachir and
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