Source: Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE) | Published: 2026-09-02
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: aid, education, president, state, transition
On July 16, 2026, when addressing the Forces vives in Yagha Province, Burkina Faso’s transitional president Captain Ibrahim Traoré referred to a statistic that seemed to take even him by surprise. “The number of young Burkinabè studying sharia law abroad is already at one thousand,” he said, and is still rising. Speaking in the context of Burkina Faso’s long-running jihadist insurgency, Traoré suggested that religious education abroad is risky because it can expose young Burkinabè to extremist interpretations of Islam beyond the state’s oversight. He then warned the students to return home, and that failure to do so could lead to them losing their Burkinabè citizenship.
The comment was notable for its religious overtones and some outlets, including members of my WhatsApp group chat where a picture of Traoré with the quote was being shared, seemed to celebrate it as a sign of proactive good governance. But I would say the most interesting thing about Traoré’s comments lies elsewhere. The proposed trigger is the decision to study sharia law abroad. In this sense, citizenship is made conditional before any charge of criminal behaviour, affiliation with a banned group, or participation in political violence. Thus, the threshold is now an educational choice. This deserves more attention because it departs from the way in which the deprivation of citizenship has generally been justified elsewhere.
In the past two decades, governments in countries such as France and the United Kingdom have broadened powers to revoke citizenship, in the name of national security. These measures have been subject to ongoing criticism from lawyers, activists, scholars, and civil liberties organisations concerned about due process and unequal citizenship. However, they have tended to be based on claims of certain conducts: the state provides evidence that some alleged act has been committed or shows a relationship with an organisation deemed to be a threat to security.
So, the present controversy revolves around whether those claims suffice to have a person’s citizenship revoked. But Traoré’s proposal is of a different order. The issue is not that these young Burkinabè have committed any offence, or that there is proven affiliation; the issue is their decision to take advantage of a particular form of education abroad. It looks like the concern precedes the specific matter to be investigated. And this raises a very unusual question: can citizenship itself be conditioned on what the state perceives as a person’s future life trajectory?
In the end, what this will augur for the legal code in Burkina Faso remains to be seen. But even as political rhetoric, the speech is a window into how security can migrate into areas that have traditionally escaped its reach.
Timing is also an important factor, because if the speech had been made in isolation, it might have been dismissed as an off-the-cuff intervention made before a local audience. But recent events point to a larger trend. In May 2026, Burkina Faso suspended the country’s largest student union for three months after it publicly criticised the government. Government officials said the organisation was acting in a way that did not match its educational role. The suspension followed a familiar junta script in which political dissent by students was presented as a problem of public disorder. Barely a month later, another measure got far less international attention. Students from Burkina Faso seeking to pursue higher education abroad will have to get government authorisation first . So, going abroad to study is now a matter of prior state approval, not a private educational choice.
When taken together, these developments suggest a slow but steady increase in the government’s control over pathways to educational mobility, through the repositioning of study abroad and student unions within the same field of security governance. However, Traoré’s remarks about citizenship extend this one step further by linking the possibility of nationality itself to personal educational decisions.
There is also a regional dimension to take note of. A day after Traore’s address, the Council of Ministers in Mali announced proposed amendments to its own citizenship law , expanding the ability of the state to strip people of nationality under certain circumstances. Until now, there is no public evidence that the Burkinabè and Malian initiatives have been coordinated. It is much too early to undertake a full analysis of the legal text from Mali and it is perfectly possible the timing is merely a coincidence. But the proximity warrants attention, because since the Alliance of Sahel States (AES) was established, Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger have increasingly presented themselves as pursuing common political projects. Whether citizenship policy will become yet another area of convergence is not yet known but appears not beyond the realms of possibility.
The domestic context helps explain why this issue has surfaced now, because Burkina Faso continues to be plagued by violent insurgency in much of the country. Security has become the organising principle of the transition, and public displays of resolve have obvious political value. In that context, Traoré drew a distinction between forms of Islamic education which position the government as proactively working to counter extremism, while affirming Islam’s role within Burkinabè society. Along with the warning, he made a counteroffer: the state would support religious education inside Burkina Faso. So, the message wasn’t just about theology, so much as the location. It is not that religious learning is outrightly forbidden; it just has to take place in a space that the government can monitor.
Traoré’s words have not been translated into a decree and no known case exists of a Burkinabè citizen having lost their nationality on these grounds. And Mali’s proposed reforms have not revealed whether there is any meaningful resemblance beyond the timing. The point of these uncertainties is that they should serve as a caution against excessive speculation. But, they should not keep us from looking at the other side of the coin: the speech offers a glimpse into a larger issue of how governments draw the boundaries of citizenship in times of insecurity. For decades the denaturalisation debate has been about punishing alleged breaches of loyalty. A further possibility is suggested by the recent rhetoric of Burkina Faso, where the gaze of the state is directed earlier, towards choices that are thought to foreshadow future disloyalty.
In David Wyllie’s translation, Franz Kafka begins The Trial with the line, “Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K. He knew he had done nothing wrong, but one morning, he was arrested.” Traoré’s comments invoke a similar logic: some of the most dangerous laws of citizenship are not those that define who is not a citizen; they are the ones that decide who is a citizen before there is anything to judge.