Background and context
The killing of seven Ghanaian traders in Titao, northern Burkina Faso, reportedly by the al-Qaeda–linked group Jama’at Nasr al-Islam wal Muslimin (JNIM), has reignited intense debate in Ghana about terrorism, state responsibility and the security of citizens who live and trade across borders. Media discussions have largely crystallised around two competing claims. One camp argues that this tragedy reflects an intelligence or security failure on the part of the Ghanaian state. The other insists that Ghana’s authorities, including the embassy in Ouagadougou, had issued travel advisories warning citizens against venturing into high-risk areas of Burkina Faso, and that these warnings were ignored.
At first glance, these positions appear irreconcilable: either the state failed, or the traders acted recklessly. Yet such a binary framing obscures the complex security environment in which West African citizens operate. This article argues that the concept of hybrid security governance — or hybridity — offers a more nuanced analytical lens through which to understand both the tragedy itself and the public debate surrounding it. Hybridity helps us see how formal state mechanisms and informal social systems coexist, interact and compete in shaping people’s decisions and security outcomes.
West Africa’s Contemporary Security Predicament
African states are navigating a particularly turbulent security season. In West Africa, democratic governance faces pressure from violent extremism, cross-border insurgencies, organised crime, and the resurgence of military coups. The Sahel has become an epicentre of jihadist violence, with groups affiliated with al-Qaeda and the Islamic State expanding their operations. These developments have intensified what might be called the continent’s “security predicament”: the simultaneous need to preserve civil liberties and democratic institutions while responding decisively to violent threats.
Burkina Faso, Ghana’s northern neighbour, has been at the frontline of this crisis. The insecurity in northern Burkina Faso, including towns such as Titao, is not episodic but structural — embedded in weak state presence, porous borders, local grievances and transnational militant networks. Ghana, though comparatively stable, is not insulated from these dynamics. The movement of traders, herders and families across colonial borders ensures that insecurity travels along the same routes as commerce.
To understand why Ghanaian traders would continue to travel to insecure zones despite official warnings, we must look beyond immediate policy debates and situate the issue within a longer historical and sociopolitical trajectory.
Historical Trade Networks and Embedded Governance
Trade between the Akan forest zones and the Sahelian and Mediterranean worlds is centuries old. Long before colonial rule, complex commercial networks connected present-day Ghana to markets across the Sahara. Historians such as Sanuel Ntewusu, Ivor Wilks and others have documented the sophistication of long-distance trade linking the forest and savannah regions.
From at least the eleventh century, Arab and other chroniclers, including Abu Ubayd Abdallah al-Bakri of Cordoba, Ibn Battuta, described trans-Saharan trade routes that moved gold, kola nuts and other commodities northwards.
Recently, historians such as Ntewusu, Daaku, Adu Boahen, Wilks, Addo-Fining, Acheampong, and others have provided detailed insights into trade from precolonial times. Prof. Samuel Ntewusu has shown that Mande communities had established themselves at Wa, Bona, and Bole by the fourteenth century through trade and commercial activities. These exchanges were not just economic transactions; they were embedded within normative systems, trust networks, mobility regimes, and governance structures that maintained relative security along trade routes. Indigenous authorities—such as chiefs, lineage heads, caravan leaders, and merchant guilds—played vital roles in securing routes and resolving disputes.
Settlements such as zongos (trading quarters) emerged as institutional expressions of these networks. They facilitated not only commerce but also dispute resolution, intelligence sharing and social protection. In other words, security was never exclusively the domain of a centralised state. It was co-produced by multiple actors within layered governance systems.
These historical arrangements did not disappear with colonialism. Rather, they were transformed.
Colonialism, Post-Colonialism and the Formal–Informal Dyad
Colonial rule radically redrew African borders following the Berlin Conference, imposing rigid territorial demarcations that disrupted older patterns of mobility. Yet colonial administrations also relied on indirect rule, incorporating and reshaping traditional authorities to govern local populations. In British West Africa, chieftaincy institutions were altered but not eliminated; they adapted to new political realities.
The result was neither a wholesale replacement of indigenous governance nor a simple continuation of precolonial systems. Instead, colonial and post-colonial Africa witnessed the emergence of a formal–informal dyad: state institutions operating alongside resilient customary, religious and community structures. These systems sometimes complemented one another, sometimes competed, and often overlapped. Prempeh and Amoah (2025), in their recent study of chieftaincy and colonialism makes the point about how chieftaincy, for example, continues to reconfigure itself as a result of opportunism or principles to remain relevant and influential. It is for them, even more important than the modern state, because it rallies people together more strongly than “the myth of the Ghanaian state,” which is a formal colonial creation.
In Ghana today, many citizens express trust in traditional and community authorities that rivals, and occasionally exceeds, trust in formal state institutions. Informal networks continue to regulate trade, extend credit, provide protection and circulate information. Cross-border traders rely not only on passports and customs regulations but also on kinship ties, ethnic solidarities and long-standing commercial relationships.
This coexistence of formal and informal systems is the essence of hybridity.
Hybridity and Hybrid Security Governance
The concept of hybridity, elaborated by scholars such as Volker Boege, captures the interaction between formal state institutions and informal social orders. Hybrid security governance recognises that security is not delivered solely by official agencies — the military, police or intelligence services — but is co-produced through a mosaic of actors including traditional leaders, vigilante groups, religious authorities, traders’ associations and community networks.
Hybrid (security) systems may be complementary, with informal actors reinforcing state authority, or competitive, where informal norms contradict formal regulations. More often than not, they are simultaneously both—coexisting in tension and collaboration.
Drawing on research in a low-income urban community in Accra, Sowatey and Atuguba demonstrated how formal policing institutions and informal community actors have, at different moments, jointly shaped the maintenance of law and order. Their study illustrates how hybrid security governance operates in practice at the community level, revealing a dynamic interplay between state and non-state actors in the production of security. Humphrey Agyekum has also recently written very interesting and insightful pieces on hybridity within the Ghana Armed Forces, shedding light on how it impacts soldiering and day-to-day activities within the institution.
Thus, for traders operating between Ghana and Burkina Faso, decision-making is shaped by this hybrid environment. They hold Ghanaian passports, use formal border posts, and, in principle, fall under the protective umbrella of the Ghanaian state. Yet their sense-making processes are equally informed by informal intelligence: phone calls from fellow traders, advice from kin across the border, assurances from local contacts, and assessments grounded in lived experience. In some subtle way, and I am sure some readers would have noticed this, I am also alluding to Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of field and habitus and how these also shape and influence people’s behaviours and choices – in this case, the traders.
When the Ghanaian state issues a travel advisory, it enters a crowded marketplace of narratives. Its warning competes with alternative sources of authority. If trusted community networks signal that business can continue — or if economic necessity overrides caution — traders may privilege informal assurances over formal advisories.
The final part (Part II) of this article by Emmanuel Sowatey, will be published on Friday, April 3.
About the Author
