ABSTRACT
On 16th January, 2012, several insurgent groups began raising another campaign against the Malian Government for independence or greater autonomy for northern Mali, an area known as Azaward. The National Movement for the Liberation of Azaward (MNLA), an organization fighting to make Azawad an independent homeland for the Tuareg people, had taken control of the region. On 21st March, 2012 President Amadou Toure was ousted in a coup d?etat because of the way and manner he was handling the crisis, a month before a presidential election which was to take place. Mutinous soldiers, calling themselves the National Committee for the Restoration of Democracy and State (CNRDR), took control and suspended the constitution of Mali. As a consequence of the instability following the coup, Mali?s three largest northern cities, Kidal, Gao and Timbuktu were overrun by the rebels on three consecutive days. Since 2012, Mali faced a crisis disrupting nearly twenty years of democratization - a coup and rebel insurgency. The problems which gave birth to this crisis includes poor governance, non-challant attitude of the Malian government towards the hues and cries of the Azward people, ignoring of the early warning indicators, corruption, poor management of scarce resources and goods, ethnicism, lack of seriousness of the stakeholders such as the Malian government, ECOWAS, UNSC French Government and Mali internal political and social wrangling. These problems were thoroughly discussed and analyzed through the application of the doctrinal and empirical methods by the researcher. In the course of the research, it was discovered that the UNSC is not performing optimally its duty of maintaining peace and security in Mali to its fullest. This is notable because despite her presence, the war still rages on. Persons are killed every day in large numbers, properties are destroyed worth several amount of money creating humanitarian crisis and gross displacement of individuals and missing persons who can?t be accounted for. It is also discovered that the insurgent groups often reorganize with the view to attacking one group or the other and all these are happening in the presence of the peacekeepers mandated by the UNSC. This unfortunately also goes to show that the UNSC has not been fully equal to the task ahead of it. Extract from this thesis further revealed the difficulty of categorizing such a complex conflict, but came to the conclusion that the intervention in Mali can indeed be labeled as a counterinsurgency operation.