Samira El-Khalil
In fragile states, memory rarely stays in the past.
Tunis, April 2026. From Tripoli to Bamako, power often appears in familiar forms: uniforms, decrees, armed escorts, televised speeches, emergency rhetoric. But that is only the visible layer. Beneath it, another grammar keeps working, slower and harder to neutralize. Trauma has become part of political circulation itself, not only as a consequence of violence, but as one of the mediums through which violence remains intelligible, persuasive, and at times even acceptable.
This is where outside analysis often falters. It still tends to read trauma as residue, as what remains after the state fractures, after the militia spreads, after the prison empties, after the body count slows. Yet in large parts of North Africa and the Sahel, trauma does not simply remain. It organizes perception. It shapes suspicion before evidence appears. It narrows the range of what populations imagine to be survivable. And once fear becomes a habit of interpretation, governance changes tone without always changing form.
Libya has lived inside that condition for years. The fragmentation of authority after Gaddafi did not only create rival centers of force. It also produced rival emotional regimes, each claiming to protect the nation from an older collapse while quietly reproducing the conditions for the next one. The language of rescue circulates constantly there. So does the language of betrayal. Neither is incidental. Both help structure the field in which legitimacy is performed.
Tripoli is full of that exhaustion. Not the theatrical kind, the deeper one. The kind that teaches citizens to read every institutional gesture with caution, every ceasefire as temporary, every narrative as partial but still dangerous enough to matter. In such a setting, propaganda does not need to be elegant. It only needs to find the nerve already exposed. A traumatized public rarely asks first whether a message is true. More often, it asks whether the message feels consistent with the disorder it already knows.
Bamako is different, but not as different as foreign observers often prefer to think. There the political vocabulary leans more openly on dignity, sovereignty, abandonment, anti colonial fatigue. The French shadow remains, not only as history, but as usable emotional material. The coups did not invent that mood. They entered it. So did the anti Western narratives that followed. Some were crude, some persuasive, some merely opportunistic. But many worked because they attached themselves to wounds already present in the political imagination.
That is part of the problem with narrative warfare as a term. It can sound too technical, almost clean. As if we were speaking about messaging strategies in the abstract. We are not. We are speaking about how lies, half truths, and selective memory settle into populations already shaped by loss, siege, humiliation, and institutional betrayal. In these environments, the fabricated story does not always defeat reality head on. Sometimes it simply arrives in a form the wound already recognizes.
The Sahel has become especially vulnerable to this because insecurity there is rarely experienced as a discrete event. It is ambient, sedimented, difficult to bracket. Border violence, displacement, insurgency, military rule, smuggling economies, communal fracture, all of it accumulates. At some point, instability stops feeling exceptional and begins to feel like the background condition through which politics must be interpreted. That shift matters. Once uncertainty becomes ordinary, almost any authority can try to sell itself as the lesser trauma.
Foreign actors understand this better than they usually admit in public. Russian influence networks, including those operating through the shadow left by Wagner and related formations, did not become effective only because they brought armed capacity or transactional protection. They entered fields already saturated with resentment, particularly anti Western resentment, and gave that resentment a new operational vocabulary. They did not create the wound. They learned how to inhabit it. China moves differently, with less theatrical aggression and more infrastructural patience, but even there the pattern is not entirely separate. States that carry unresolved trauma are often easier to penetrate through elite bargains, because exhaustion lowers resistance to systems that promise order without requiring trust.
Religion adds another layer, and a more delicate one. Across North Africa and the Sahel, faith is not reducible to manipulation, nor should it be. It can anchor continuity where the state has withdrawn. It can protect dignity, memory, and communal rhythm against fragmentation. But it can also be folded into governance in subtler ways. Moral language can become regulatory language. Religious legitimacy can be used to narrow dissent, to reframe obedience, to distinguish acceptable grief from dangerous grief. When that happens, belief does not cease to be sincere. It becomes politically usable.
There is a temptation to treat these societies as merely broken, but that word conceals too much. What exists instead is a kind of suspended political condition. Institutions remain, sometimes elections too, international partners certainly, official vocabularies always. Yet memory itself has become unstable terrain. Who is allowed to speak for the dead. Which violence counts as origin. Which humiliation must be avenged, and which one must be forgotten in the name of order. Those struggles do not sit outside politics. They are politics.
This is why transitional justice has mattered so much, and why its failure has been so costly. In theory, it offers a way to metabolize violence without converting it into permanent command. In practice, much of the region has seen delayed reckoning, partial truth, ritual acknowledgement, or nothing at all. The vacuum that follows is rarely empty for long. Militias fill it. Juntas fill it. Foreign intermediaries fill it. So do digital propagandists, whose advantage lies not in their originality, but in their speed.
The digital sphere has made the metabolism of pain even harsher. Images detach from time. Atrocity footage reappears stripped of context. Old fears are recoded as new emergencies. Conspiracy moves with the fluency of memory, because both depend on recognition. What platforms accelerate is not only falsehood, but emotional reactivation. They make it harder for societies to place events in sequence. Everything starts to feel simultaneous. The effect is cognitive, but also political. A public locked inside continuous injury is easier to steer, easier to fatigue, and often easier to frighten into submission.
None of this means populations are passive or politically naïve. That would be another external simplification. People know manipulation when they see it more often than analysts assume. The problem is different. Recognition does not automatically create escape. A citizen may distrust the state, distrust the militia, distrust the foreign patron, distrust the online campaign, and still remain trapped inside the horizon all of them have helped construct. Trauma does not eliminate intelligence. It compresses maneuverability.
That is why democracy in these contexts remains suspended rather than merely absent. The issue is not only that institutions are weak or captured, though many are. It is that the emotional preconditions of citizenship have been destabilized repeatedly. Trust erodes faster than procedure can repair it. Public language grows defensive. Memory hardens into faction. Under such pressure, voting can still happen, constitutions can still circulate, international recognition can still be granted. But legitimacy remains thin, and thin legitimacy is easily overtaken by fear.
Perhaps the deeper question is not whether these societies remember too much. It may be that they have not been allowed to remember in politically livable ways. There is a difference between memory and enclosure. Between mourning and recruitment. Between testimony and the endless reactivation of injury for strategic ends. Where institutions fail to mediate that difference, trauma ceases to be only historical. It becomes administrative.
From Tripoli to Bamako, that conversion is already well underway. Trauma moves through speeches, checkpoints, classrooms, mosques, platforms, security briefings, and foreign policy scripts. It legitimizes force more easily than it legitimizes repair. It rewards those who can weaponize injury and marginalizes those who still speak in the slower register of law, truth, and civic reconstruction. That may be the harshest feature of narrative warfare in fragile states. It does not simply distort what happened. It teaches power how to inhabit what happened, and then remain there.