Vigilantismus in Sphären sozialer Nähe: Zur Emergenz der Strafpraxis urbaner Koglweogo-Gruppen in Burkina Faso

Koglweogo self-defense groups in Burkina Faso have been running their own prisons to fight crime since 2016. Based on ethnographic research with three urban Koglweogo groups in Ouagadougou, this article explores the logic of their punitive practice and the ways they manage offenses. The analysis will reveal that a majority of thefts, robberies, and frauds are not committed by strangers, but by people with personal or even close relations. In demonstrating how the Koglweogo are reconstructing, negotiating, and deciding cases with those affected, the article argues that the Koglweogo attach less importance to the actual crime than to the business, kinship, and personal relationships behind it. Their response to offenses is thus much more nuanced and situative than portrayed in the literature on vigilantism in Africa, as they punish captives neither indiscriminately nor according to clear notions of justice. The article concludes that vigilante groups play a key role in intergenerational conflicts and processes of social change and offers explanations that go beyond state-centric problematizations of vigilantism. A detailed examination of the lived experiences of crime and vigilantism – and how they are intertwined – will complicate our understanding of vigilante violence in West Africa and move beyond the common trope of a moral twilight.