The provision of security services to citizens – e.g. justice and protection – is an important challenge in Africa, where many nation-states are considered “fragile” because the rule of law is weak. In fact, there has been an uptake of non-state and informal security provision, or vigilantism, which has been shown to “fill the formal police gap” in fragile states (Sen and Pratten 2007). Yet vigilantism also brings up important questions about the legitimacy of vigilante policing and its contributions to dynamics of state-building – delivering public services or not – in fragile state contexts.
A good case study for understanding the legitimacy of vigilante policing is that of Burkina Faso. The country ranks under the “high warning” category in the 2016 Fund For Peace assessment, due to both the weakness of the rule of law and to growing number of islamist attack threats in the Sahelian region (FFP 2016). Since 2015 in Burkina Faso, a vigilante group called “kogl weogo” (“guardians of the bush” in mooré, one of the national languages) has emerged and grown as a response to burkinabè citizen complaints against inefficient state police forces. This research project will map out the sources of kogl weogo legitimacy as a way to better understand the role that vigilante policing plays in the delivery of public security services in fragile states contexts. The main research question is under what conditions does the legitimacy of kogl weogo vigilantism come about?
Analytically, there are two main sides to legitimacy, which may be reduced as “legitimacy from below” and “legitimacy from above”. These two sides have not well been integrated as yet in a single study (Bagayoko, Hutchful, and Luckham 2016), and the case of the kogl weogo presented here will combine them. Firstly, legitimacy from below comprises the relationship between vigilante police and citizens, and it questions whether the actions of vigilante police advance their own interests, and/or
those of citizens. In Burkina Faso, the kogl weogo vigilantes have been undertaking punitive raids on
criminals (mostly animal cattle and motorcycle thieves, and armed robbers). These have been controversial. Public support is generally divided between opinions that welcome the ability of koglweogo to “do the job” that a perceived inactive and corrupt state security force does not, and opinions that raise suspicion and fear around the unaccountability of kogl weogo vigilantes. The main research
questions (RQs) for understanding legitimacy from below are:
- RQ 1: What security services (e.g. protection, justice?) do kogl weogo vigilantes provide and to whom? - RQ 2: To what extent do citizens perceive their security to be enhanced or threatened bykogl weogo policing?
The project will investigate kogl weogo policing in places where it has been particularly active. It will focus on specific cases, and analyse the advantages and dangers of such policing, as they are perceived “from below”, by citizens.
Secondly, legitimacy may be characterised as “from above”, when it refers to the relationship between vigilante and state representatives. At the local level, the formal police have tended to either arrest or facilitate kogl weogo actions in different places, and there is knowledge gap on the reasons underlying these different police approaches. The project will generate knowledge on everyday relationships between formal police and kogl weogo vigilantes, building upon the work of Helmke and
Levitsky (2004) that draws out four possible forms of relationships between formal police and vigilantes, namely: complementary, accommodating, competing and substituting.
1 The main question for understanding legitimacy from above are:
- RQ 3: What characterises the relationship between police forces and kogl weogo
vigilantes at the local level? (as per Hemke and Levitsky (2004)) Together, these three research questions will generate a dataset that will allow to systematically map out the grounds for or against support of kogl weogo vigilantism, and to contribute to
wider discussions about the conditions under which vigilantism can be considered legitimate or not.

Conduit sur trois ans, les données du projet ont été publiés sous forme d'articles scientifiques dans des revues de renom.
1. S'adosser à la chefferie traditionnelle pour se développer: la stratégies d'implantation des koglweogo au Burkina Faso (Revue Africaine et Malgache de Recherche Scientifique (RAMReS, décembre 2019)
2. Politiser le vide sécuritaire: A propos des groupes d'auto-défense koglweogo au Burkina Faso (Politique Africaine, septembre 2021).

Les résultats de la recherche ont aussi fait l'objet de plusieurs présentations dans des instances scientifiques
https://lefaso.net/spip.php?page=web-tv-video&id_article=88012&rubrique460

University of Zurich