Navigating contested epistemic fields of resource extraction: great power competition, information warfare, and local agency in the Sahel

This article examines how narratives about resource extraction inform geopolitical ruptures and alliance-making in Mali's evolving information warfare. It contributes to debates on resource geopolitics, information warfare, and local agency in shaping internationalized conflict dynamics in the Sahel. Since Mali’s 2020 coup d’état, the country’s abundant strategic resources – gold, uranium, lithium, oil, and gas – have become central to great power politics and national power struggles. Concomitantly, Mali’s ongoing war has become a battleground for competing information and disinformation campaigns where various actors seek to influence public perceptions of external actors and their interests in the war. Where Russia has targeted Mali’s information space to create new alliances, Malian actors have, in turn, adopted, interpreted and recreated these narratives to constitutive political effect. Despite increasing government-imposed constraints on digital expression, local actors thereby assert agency through social media by amplifying anti-Western sentiment and denouncing foreign operations. We introduce the concept of ‘navigating contested epistemic fields’ to help analyse how activists, politicians, and influencers reshape global discourses on resource geopolitics to negotiate their position within global orders.