Dr. Khalid Mustafa Medani is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and the Institute of Islamic Studies, and Chair of the African Studies Program at McGill University. Professor Medani’s research focuses on globalization, informal economics and Islamist and Ethnic Politics in Africa and the Middle East with a special focus on Sudan, Egypt, and Somalia.
Medani’s recent book, , which was published in October 2021 by Cambridge University Press, speaks to the different roles that informal social and economic networks have played in the rise of new forms of Islamist and ethnic politics. It also explores how globalization produced thriving informal markets and ultimately led to the rise of distinct forms of identity politics in Egypt, Sudan, and Somalia.
“One of the goals of this book is to enhance global understanding about the relationship between economic and political change and Islamist political movements more generally,” says Medani, “and to broaden knowledge about which specific types of informal mechanisms are (or are not) conducive to the rise of Islamist militancy and recruitment in particular local contexts.”
We asked Professor Medani to share his thoughts and insights on the extensive research and fieldwork he undertook to write his book.
Q: How did the idea for this book, and its subsequent research come to be? Why was it important to analyse informal economies and globalization and its impacts on moderate and militant Islamist movements?
The idea for this book originated in a series of human rights violations I witnessed in my home country of Sudan which led me to investigate the relationship among globalization, informal markets, and political violence. In that period, and under the Islamist authoritarian regime of the recently ousted Omar Bashir, the Bashir regime oversaw the killings and imprisonment of scores of Sudanese who were allegedly involved in the flourishing black-market trade (i.e., the trade in foreign currency) in the country. In subsequent years, I began to conduct research on the motive behind the state’s “wrath” against those actors in civil society involved in the informal economy and discovered that the latter’s primary interest was to monopolize the informal trade in workers’ remittances to finance their own Islamist clientelist networks.
It was during my research in Sudan that I first realized the importance of analyzing the relationship among globalization, informal economies, and its impact on the evolution of moderate and militant Islamist movements. It was during this period of my preliminary research that I first realized the great significance and true weight of labor remittances in terms of their impact on local political and economic dynamics. These observations and subsequent research in Sudan, Somalia, as well as in Egypt inspired this book.
The central argument of the book is that variable state capacity to regulate financial inflows accruing from the remittances of expatriate workers as well as the ability of different political coalitions to monopolize lucrative informal markets shaped whether Islamist or ethnic politics prevailed and gained popular appeal in civil society. Beyond this book’s academic contributions, it is my hope that it also serves as a modest contribution to ongoing public concerns
Q: Your latest book is based on long-term, immersive field research in Egypt, Sudan, and Somalia. What did this field work consist of? Were there any findings or stories that surprised you during the research process?
The field research for this book consisted of a variety of qualitative data collection methods, which included semi-structured interviews, focus groups, participant observation, including the attendance of the Friday sermons on a regular basis, archival research and a large household survey spanning over four hundred villages and towns across Northeast and Northwest Somalia.
Naturally, over the course of this immersive field research one encounters multiple surprises that guide, inform and refine the research in multiple ways. The research puzzles one uncovers during field work play a central part of the enjoyment of research and vastly enhance the quality of the work. One of the most important surprises was to realize the sheer political importance of the role of labor remittances and that of the informal currency trade made possible by large scale migration in many countries of the Middle East and Africa.
One of the most memorable quotes I cite in the book is from the late scholar Charles Tilly who once noted that expatriate remittances generated by migration flows “are a serious business, not only for individuals and the families involved, but also for whole national economies.” I think this finding, accumulated from scores of interviews and archival research, poignantly illustrates another key welcome surprise I observed: that is, the great generosity of, and deeply held trust between, individuals, and communities in the context of deep economic crises which lies at the heart of why millions of individuals send a great part of their income back home to support their families.
Another surprising finding that came to represent the conceptual core of this book had to do with the discovery of the intimate social as well as economic link between different types of informal markets. At the time of my research the conventional analysis of markets, while acknowledging the link between the state and a particular type of informal market, rarely recognized the fact that informal markets function in close social proximity to other parallel, illicit, criminal, or otherwise unofficial markets. In the case of Somalia, for example, the expansion of the parallel market fueled a different type of informal market centered on livestock trade, which in turn facilitated the creation of a thriving urban informal urban sector all of which were organized around clan networks. The reason for this is that clan networks were the most efficient creating a social structure to control competition and pricing behavior. Similarly, the relative success of the Islamists in Egypt and Sudan was in large part due the Islamists’ monopolization of black-market transactions that negotiated an intimate link with informal and official financial markets. Even though they represented a relatively small group, this strategy enabled the Islamists to establish a monopoly over informal finance and credit utilizing their political coalition to control competition.
Q: Can you tell us about your recent book launch in your hometown of Omdurman, Sudan at the historic Ahfad University (oldest Women’s University in Africa). What was it like sharing your work with readers, students, and academics in your hometown?
Delivering a lecture on this book in my hometown of Omdurman was an enormous privilege. After all, the book is very much about community and my preliminary research began in the town of Omdurman where I first learned the importance of the role of informal financial markets in the context of the rise of a strong Islamist movement in the country.
There are two additional reasons why I was gratified to launch my book in Omdurman. The first is an ethical one. All such research, in my view, must be based on the premise that the work is part of a collective, mutually beneficial enterprise. Therefore, I was delighted to share my findings with students and academics in Sudan and I also shared preliminary findings in universities in Egypt and Somalia prior to the book’s completion.
What I appreciated the most in Omdurman, is the way in which the audience followed my lecture with a discussion of how the work spoke to their daily concerns and the extent to which it was relevant to the larger political situation in the country. Students and faculty alike shared their own views with respect to the political and economic consequences of the black market and the current struggle for democracy in Sudan aiding me in my current new research.
The second reason has to do with simply giving back. The University itself is renowned not only for educating young women; it has also strived hard to admit young women from marginalized ethnic groups and economically marginalized communities and to secure funding for them through collaboration with international lending institutions, including some here in Canada. My own role as I see it is to link up the knowledge that I have gained from teaching students at McGill and share those insights with students abroad in both an intellectual and practical sense. It is my fervent wish to be able to set up exchanges with Ahfad and McGill in ways that would be mutually beneficial and generative for both communities: one in Canada and another in East Africa.
Q: In your acknowledgements, you mentioned how some of your doctoral and undergraduate students provided great inspiration over the years. Which areas of your research most resonated with your students and why? Did some of your students’ convictions, research and perspectives shape or change your research and your book? Why or why not?
It is impossible to adequately summarize the extent to which my doctoral, masters and undergraduate students have inspired me in my research over the years. As just one example, the first in-person launch of this book here at McGill was organized and sponsored by the (ASSA). As the long-time Chair of the African Studies Program, I was humbled by their public support and encouragement of this book and of my other work over the years. Even more importantly, I have long been inspired by their tireless devotion to promoting the study of Africa across the disciplines among McGill’s undergraduates.
My graduate students have provided an equal level of inspiration to me over the years. As every faculty member will attest, graduate students are no less than knowledge producers. It is the questions that students ask of one’s work that often serve to fill in the analytical gaps and strengthen the broader theoretical framework so crucial to any type of successful research endeavor.
Given their varied interests, my students resonated with different aspects of my research. Some students interested in the causes of violent extremism naturally favored my research and findings on youth militant recruitment, others more inclined towards broader issues of political economy found the discussion on globalization and the politics of informal markets in Africa and the Middle East more inspiring as it pertained to their own research interests. There is no question that the depth, breadth, and general high quality of my students’ research programs not only helped shape but, in my opinion, improved the quality of my book.
Ultimately, this book is quite ambitious in that it intervenes in a wide range of academic literature including the scholarship on globalization, informal economies, militancy, and terrorism. In doing so I introduce what one scholar has noted as “contentious but credible propositions.” My intellectual engagement with my students over the years challenged me to strengthen and tighten my overall argument and conceptual framework and to include the necessary empirical evidence required. However, in terms of the ideas, research and perspectives that make up the book’s foundation those were naturally generated from Sudanese, Egyptians, and Somalis who were generous with their time and knowledge and privileged me with their trust to develop and complete this book and to ‘tell’ their often-misrepresented stories and voices.
Q: Your book explores why youth are attracted to militant organizations. What discoveries did you make about youths’ potential to be a catalyst for change?
This book is certainly concerned with understanding the political and socio-economic factors which give rise to youth recruitment into militant organizations. But it is no less about a far larger issue that is important to our understanding of the role of youths’ potential to be a catalyst for change: this is the question of when and under what conditions religious, rather than other forms of identity, become politically salient in the context of youth mobilization and activism.
There is no question that youth serve as a catalyst for change but the issue of what this change entails is a crucial and complicated one that requires more analytical focus. In the Middle East and Africa, youth mobilization operates through informal networks that offer a shared sense of cultural cohesion, and serve to further the material, ideological and political interests of those youth who join a wide array of social movements. The reason I believe youth are catalyst for change is that they are chiefly responsible for building and sustaining informal networks through which they come to trust each other. It is these types of organizations, built on trust networks, that generate dramatic change. But, as I caution in my book, the very advantage of these youth organizations built on trust networks can also be a liability in that they can be easily captured by repressive states and/or exploited for the purposes of more extremist resistance to state institutions and rival groups in civil society.
Therefore, I hope that readers of my book will focus on distinguishing between different types of youth mobilization, be they Islamist-moderate, militant, or pro-democratic. It is not only important to understand the mechanisms by which youth are mobilized for political objectives in general or idealized terms; it is crucial that we come to grasp how and why youth-led informal networks may form the bases for mobilization of militant organizations in one context, and pro-democracy forces in another.
In my research for this book and in the current work I am pursuing on youth activism in Africa, I would say that the divergent developments of youth activism are crucially dependent on the economic and political policies of states influenced by the interventions of external economic actors in the region.
Q: What trends have you noticed in your research over the years? How does this connect to issues that touch all of us, in ways we might not realize?
I hope readers will come away from reading this work with a renewed interest of two essential themes central to the book: the importance of informal trust-based commercial networks to our understanding of the dynamics of changes in state-civil society relations, and, in more universal ways, how local communities respond to dramatic economic and social change in different ways contingent on their own local cultural endowments, social institutions, and capacity for political mobilization and activism.
At its heart, this book speaks about how communities both come together and fall apart under the exigenciese of economic crisis as well as political closures. I hope that these themes of the book connect to issues that “touch of all of us” in surprising ways. In the book’s preface I explain that the book describes the ways in which millions in Africa and the Middle East are establishing new rules of conduct and obligations based on locally specific cultural and normative ties of not only solidarity and cooperation but also exploitation and violence.
Given the present issues related to the COVID pandemic, the global environmental crisis and deepening authoritarianism in many parts of the world, how communities reconstitute themselves, and forge cooperative ties rather than promote more exploitative relations will determine a wide variety of outcome and determine whether positive forms of social capital will outweigh its more negative variety. I hope that readers will then see themselves and their communities in parts of this book and understand Black Markets and Militants' cover as symbolic of the universal ideal of striving (the greater Jihad) for a better life, as well as forms of spiritual enlightenment central to the Islamic tradition in many parts of Africa, the Middle East and beyond.
Dr. Khalid Mustafa Medani is Associate Professor of Political Science and Islamic Studies and Chair of the African Studies Program at McGill, and he has also taught at Oberlin College and Stanford University. Dr. Medani received a B.A. in Development Studies from Brown University, an M.A. in Development Studies from the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on globalization, informal economies, and Islamist and Ethnic Politics in Africa and the Middle East with a special focus on Sudan, Egypt, and Somalia. Dr. Medani is the author of (Cambridge University Press, 2021) and he is presently working on a manuscript on the causes and consequences of Sudan’s 2018 popular uprising and the prospects for Democracy. In addition, he has published on the roots of youth militant recruitment, the debate over terrorist finance, and civil conflict in the Horn of Africa with a special focus on the armed conflicts in Sudan and Somalia. His work has appeared in the Journal of Democracy, the Journal of North African Studies, Current History, Middle East Report, Review of African Political Economy, Arab Studies Quarterly, and the UCLA Journal of Islamic Law. Dr. Medani is a previous recipient of a Carnegie Scholar on Islam award from the Carnegie Corporation of New York and, more recently, he was awarded a Woodrow Wilson Scholarship from the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars in 2020-2021