Abdourahmane Idrissa on wrestling with the state in West Africa and the Sahel.

This week, we get to hear Dr Abdourahmane Idrissa, a Nigerien philosopher and political scientist based in Leiden but who has worked and lived all around the world. Idrissa’s areas of research expertise include the state, Islam, democracy, and security in the Sahel and West Africa more broadly.In this episode, he speaks with Henry and Gaddafi a truly wide range of subjects, from the impact of 9/11 on his academic path to the birth and death of the Songhai empire, and from the intellectual prophets of the 1960s to West African social structure - and, of course, the security crises in the Sahel.