Beyond the “Moral Community”

In the large body of literature on vigilantism and policing in Africa, the trope of the “moral community” emerges around three core assumptions. The first is that vigilantes produce the “moral community” and announce themselves to be its “protector” (Pratten 2008a: 6), which is often also a strategy for mobilizing public support (see Nolte 2008). A second assumption is that vigilantes impose a moral order that generally represents the values of the “moral community,” which is why they either enjoy moral popularity (e.g., Smith 2004) or make locally legitimated exceptions (e.g., Hellweg 2011; Kyed 2009). In this spirit, Lars Buur points out that “young crime fighters [face] a moral dilemma: they are expected to act in ways that are forbidden, even criminalized, but which the community concerned sees as both acceptable and desirable within the moral code of the township” (Buur 2008: 581). The third assumption is that vigilante groups form a moral community that not only acts on the basis of a fixed notion of moral order but also imposes this order consensually (e.g., Dupuy 2021; Harnischfeger 2003).

The latter two assumptions in particular offer a vivid example of how Émile Durkheim's (1992) notion of morality as a rigid and universal scheme of society has shaped anthropological scholarship for a long time (see Laidlaw 2002). It was only with the so-called ethical turn that the discipline started to confront morality as a more relational, experiential, and contingent element of everyday practice (see Dyring et al. 2018). In this article, I will draw on this debate and its conceptual tools to push beyond ideas of the “moral community” in the study of vigilantism and analyze the ordinary moral life of vigilantes through their personal trajectories and everyday practice. In doing so, I am not neglecting the fact that vigilantes share certain moral values among themselves and with their communities but will demonstrate that they do so in a responsive and much more conflictual way than depicted.

Recently, Jarrett Zigon (2023) has developed a useful theoretical framework that recognizes morality as a binding but contingent product of human interaction. In suggesting that morality provides the basis for a disposition for the comfort of living with others, he highlights the moral as consisting of relational moments in which “one has become attuned to one's world and those others there with you” (ibid.: 41). For Zigon, morality is thus not as deterministic as in the Durkheimian sense but is constitutive of a shared “between” that builds through peoples’ everyday striving to accommodate each other's expectations and judgments.

However, this “between” is always in flux and fragile. People can work to be morally attuned to one another, but their moral expectations and judgments will always conflict and change in response to changing situations and conditions. Furthermore, in moments of personal or collective doubt or crisis, people can experience their attunement processes breaking down (see also Zigon 2007), making them reflect on the morality of an event, a social situation, or a question more attentively (Zigon 2023). The Koglweogo, I will show, emerged in response to such a “moral breakdown” (see also Zigon 2007), which was caused by the fact that many crimes occurred among people who belong to inner circles of families, neighbors, and friends. Therefore, the claim that vigilantes pursue a moral project in moments of “moral decay” (Buur 2008: 583) or “moral panic” (Ivasiuc et al. 2022: 60) is not entirely misleading. However, my findings suggest that this moral project is less unequivocal and assertive than it is often thought to be, but that it carefully considers and responds to a highly dynamic and heterogenous landscape of interpersonal moral demands (Løgstrup [1956] 2020).

Starting from the moral relationality and responsiveness of vigilante orders also helps to challenge the assumption that vigilantes form a consistent “moral community” that cohesively strives toward establishing their fixed notion of moral order. Some authors point to the ambiguity and changeability of this notion (Pratten 2008b: 65), but most research on vigilantes indicates that moral codes rooted in culture, ritual, and magical power form a substantial basis and prerequisite for the organization of their violent configuration (e.g., Harnischfeger 2003; Hellweg 2011). Generally, it still seems to be a dominant presumption that groups exercising violence collectively follow consensual rules and moral visions (Bakonyi and Bliesemann de Guevara 2012) or else have no morality at all. This can partly be explained by methodological challenges and a lack of research studying violent groups from within (see Bähre 2015) and partly by racialized stereotypes shaping depictions of “gangs,” “militias,” and “mobs” in African contexts (see Majavu 2020).

Contrary to this presumption, I found the moral to become most tangible and complicated within violent groups, in which actors exercise “the power to do harm” (Heald 2002: 4). After all, violent events in which harm is inflicted on people's bodies (Popitz [1986] 2017) constitute emotionally loaded situations of unpredictable consequence and are rarely implemented in as cold and controlled a fashion as it may seem from a distance. Rather, micro-sociological explorations of violence illuminate how easily violence gets out of hand (see Collins 2008), causing unforeseeable psychological, physical, and social consequences for both perpetrator and victim. With this in mind, I hope to complicate our understanding of the morality of violence within vigilante groups, which I found to be neither exempt from personal moral dilemmas nor rooted in moral imperatives (e.g., Pratten 2008a; Titeca 2009). I will do so by drawing on Sheryl Mattingly's concept of the “moral laboratory,” which employs a first-person perspective and understands people as moral “experimenters of their own lives” (ibid.: 309). This notion allows me to explore vigilante violence openly as “singular acts that transform material and social space and create moral selves” (ibid.: 310) in a highly unpredictable and experimental way. In doing so, I hope to contribute to a small but growing body of work on the moral dynamics of conflict, war, and “evil” (see Fassin 2013; Fassin 2015; Olsen and Csordas 2019), especially those dealing with the moral contestations and interpersonal struggles that unfold behind group-based violence (see Cooper-Knock 2014).

The Koglweogo: Hierarchies, Politics, and the State

Vigilantism has a long history in Burkina Faso. The Koglweogo (Mooré for kogle “protect” plus weogo “territory”), as we know them today, emerged after the turn of the millennium with the first rural group in the Yatenga region in 2005 (e.g., Hagberg 2019) and the first urban group in Ouagadougou in 2013. Only two years later, Koglweogo groups formed across the whole country. Not long before, in October 2014, a popular insurrection chased former president Blaise Compaoré out of the country after 27 years of rule (Hagberg et al. 2018), inaugurating an ongoing era of political upheaval and security crisis in Burkina Faso.

The power vacuum after Compaoré’s fall produced ideal conditions for the Koglweogo to establish themselves across the state. However, the Koglweogo were not involved in the popular insurrection, nor did they, as international and local observers feared, wish to replace or oppose the state. Since their early beginnings, their main agenda has been to fight the problem of theft and robberies in communities, for which they started to run their own prisons and hold public trials to punish accused thieves. Over time these trials were transformed into less spectacular processes of conflict meditation in which the Koglweogo negotiate between the conflicting parties and try to resolve the conflict, as I show in this article. For this purpose, they gather accusers, accused, relatives, and witnesses for interrogation to decide on the proper retribution, which normally covers fines, moral lessons, short periods of imprisonment, shaming, cultural oaths, and corporal punishment, such as whippings.

Parallel to the Koglweogo's emergence, Compaoré’s fall caused a massive deterioration in Burkina Faso's overall security situation and favored the rapid expansion of jihadist movements across the country. In 2020, after the government issued a new decree to recruit civilians in the fight against terror, more and more Koglweogo members, especially in rural regions, joined the militia police, “Les Volontaires pour la Defense de la Patrie” (VDP), to defend and secure communities. The VDP can be understood as a strategy of the state to draw the Koglweogo into public service (Kalfelis 2023). Yet, despite this public deployment, the Koglweogo have always rejected institutionalization as an official neighborhood police force. In contrast to other cases of vigilantism in Africa, they do not want to operate as the police's “eyes, ears, and wheels” (Colona and Diphoorn 2017: 9), nor are they aligned with particular political parties, as in recent cases of vigilantism in Ghana (Kyei 2020). Rather, the Koglweogo informally depend on the government's tolerance but work autonomously from the state. Operative between the private and public domain, they are a good example of Christian Lund's (2006) “twilight institution.”

Koglweogo groups, which consist mostly of males but also some females, have both young and elderly, and both active and passive members. They are arranged in a patriarchally organized, transregional tree topology with more loosely and strictly defined hierarchies between the subordinate and superordinate groups. The latter are responsible for internal conflicts and abuses of power among their subordinates (Soré 2019). In a province like Kadiogo, which includes the capital of Ouagadougou, approximately 64 groups are organized in a clearly defined chain of command. Another pivotal role is that of the Koglweogo's widely respected national representative, the customary chief Rassamkandé, who can issue new codes of conduct across regions (Kibora et al. 2018). However, the diligence with which members obey them varies, which can lead to internal conflict and the fracturing of units (see Kalfelis 2021b), as well as cross-regional changes in their codes of conduct, as I show later.

Internally, the groups are also defined by hierarchical chains of command at the bottom of which are several mainly young patrollers called wibega or wibse in the plural (English sparrowhawks). They are responsible for catching thieves and implementing punishments and are monitored by the head of wibega, a secretary general, and several advisers. The latter are usually the more respected elderly men who intervene in the conflict mediations with their advice. Furthermore, every group has a formal leadership consisting of a president and vice president. They have the formal responsibility for the group's day-to-day operations and punishments, although the president tends to be an absent symbolic figure, while the vice president is much more invested in running the day-to-day business. Meanwhile, the Koglweogo are also embedded in the cultural and political infrastructures of authority, which means that each group's leadership has to correspond closely with the chieftaincy of their neighborhood. As Issifou, the Koglweogo vice president in the city district of Kouba explained: “If the chief says that we have to stop our activity, we will lay down our arms the same day.”³

At the time of writing (in 2024), amidst the tarred roads, markets, and shops of the city, the Koglweogo are still running prisons and mediating conflicts. Here, they are both feared and desired by the population. “They are frightening, but at night we can sleep peacefully,”⁴ said Zarata, a student who had a side job in my hotel. Her ambivalence demonstrates why the often-mentioned moral popularity of vigilantes would be an insufficient explanation for why Koglweogo still exist after almost 10 years. The following sections will draw a more complex and dynamic picture of the Koglweogo's ordinary moral life, which will also shed some light on how they have become established as a more permanent institution of conflict management in Burkina Faso.

Crime as Moral Breakdown

During my earlier research on transnational NGO work in Burkina Faso (2009–2017), theft and robberies were becoming an increasing problem. Thieves, people would often say, are walking around on the street soon after being arrested by the police. Yet, while seeing alleged thieves walking around led to a desire for new punishment rationales, the familiarity of many thieves created the shared sense of an unfolding and urgent moral crisis within communities. The dangers of crime were not lurking outside, as often described in other cases of vigilantism in Africa (e.g., Göpfert 2012), but emerged from within people's own circles (see also Cooper-Knock 2014; Smith 2019). The following case illustrates the intimate nature of crime in Ouagadougou.

On 19 February 2019, three men attacked a woman in front of her house to steal her motorbike. Only one escaped with the bike, while neighbors caught the other two. They then argued over whether to call the Koglweogo or the police. Other neighbors, in a rage about the aggression that had been used against the woman and the thieves’ audacity in attacking her in broad daylight, started to beat the thieves. While doing so and pouring gasoline over them, the Koglweogo wibse (patrollers) eventually arrived and rescued the culprits. After tying them up, they escorted them to their prison, next to which I was sitting with Jean-Pierre, an elderly Koglweogo and retired soldier. Not much later, the most shocking details about the incident came out. A wibega (patroller) discovered the motorbike in the court of a friend and neighbor of the woman's family. Whether he was behind the offense or only assisted the ambushers was unclear at this point, but also it didn't matter. Jean-Pierre shook his head in consternation and said incredulously to himself rather than to me: “They sleep together. They eat together.” He then looked at me and added: “There is a lack of confidence.”⁵ I nodded empathically, unsure how to respond. Silent and absorbed in thought, we watched the other Koglweogo members as they hurriedly organized hospital transport for the two badly injured men in the prison.

Jean-Pierre's reaction referenced the fact that the woman who had been attacked and the neighbor were no strangers to each other. With their families living and sleeping door by door, sharing meals and familiar spaces, the attack had a particular moral weight that came with great disappointment, incomprehension, and even shock. Such crimes signal that something more profound is at play than mere material harm. Some of the basic agreements of what it means to act responsibly and to live morally and thus comfortably with each other were at stake. These were acceptations that had obviously lost their validity and produced heightened attention to how far people were willing to attend to each other's moral expectations and commitments (Zigon 2023: 10).

The frequency of theft, robberies, and fraud among people who are familiar with each other is why crime in Burkina Faso was seen as a symptom of a deeper moral crisis. It became a central source of personal moral irritation, slowly forming the shared perception of a “moral breakdown” (Zigon 2007). “You knew who was a thief and who wasn't,” recalled a high-positioned Koglweogo member and traditional chief in the district of Somgandé with the respected name of bassem-yam naaba (man of confidence). It was a busy afternoon; the Koglweogo were in the middle of a mediation when he sat down beside me and pointed to one of the other members: “Him? He could be a thief. Your own son could be. But nobody was doing anything about it.”⁶ He then compared the government with a father who has failed to educate his children morally. “If a 16-year-old acts out of line and causes trouble,” he said, “it is not the child's fault but the father's, who failed to care for his children or to show them the right path to adulthood.”

By means of his allegory, the bassem-yam naaba blamed the state for the rise of crime among intimates and the moral disappointment that came along with it. He was convinced that the state and its failures had not only rendered impunity and crime endemic to social life, but also produced new forms of family life. His narrative construction of danger could also be interpreted as a typical strategy of legitimation and empowerment that can be found in orders of vigilance (see Ivasiuc et al. 2022). However, my participation in over 120 of the Koglweogo's mediations of conflict suggests that crime has indeed reached deeper into the moral and affective structures of families and communities. Below the surface of narratives criticizing the state, an astounding number of crimes that the Koglweogo mediate are of a personal nature: friends who make false promises or convince each other to invest in a scam business, sons who steal money from the house, or long-standing employees of shopkeepers who suddenly disappear with the cashier. The mediation of such crimes, which is one of the Koglweogo's main occupations, turned out to be particularly delicate because those who demand the Koglweogo's help have to accept that their relative, neighbor, colleague, or friend may be shamed and punished. In other words, a decision to accuse a familiar person of a crime at the vigilantes’ premises can amount to an immoral act of betrayal in itself. Such cases therefore confront the Koglweogo with emotionally charged and sensitive situations. They require them to intervene with care and often in conflict with their own views of “right” and “wrong.” Accusers bring their own moral views of what should or should not be done to make recompense for the crime, and the Koglweogo's reputation relies heavily on their ability to manage those expectations, as well as intervene in a way that appeases rather than exacerbates the moral tensions.

Understanding these intimate moral eddies underlying the lived experience of crime in Burkina Faso illuminates why the Koglweogo cannot afford to restore a “moral breakdown” by enforcing a fixed notion of moral order. Every case of crime builds upon a highly situational and personal assemblage of moral expectations, trajectories, and judgments that require careful consideration. If they want to help others build a new basis for moral attunement (Zigon 2023: 9)—if they want to restore rather than further burden peoples’ relationships—they need to adapt their intervention in every single mediation, which can mean punishing an accused person contrary to their own estimate of the situation or refraining from punishing someone at all.

Against this background, I argue that we have to understand vigilantes’ interventions in crime in urban Burkina Faso as an opening for ordinary violent “spaces of possibility” (Mattingly 2013: 311). In those spaces, all the parties involved engage in “experiments in how life might or should be lived” (ibid.) by reflecting on and fighting about their moral disappointments and mutual expectations. We can thus see that vigilantes do not exercise violence on the basis of a clear moral vision but strive to respond adequately to the moral urgencies of others. This tightrope walking, I show next, also complicates vigilantes’ personal projects of moral self-making and significantly affects their intimate lives.

“Everyone has Dignity”: Personal Struggles of Vigilante Becoming

Antoine, an animal breeder of Peulh origin, founded the Koglweogo group in Kouba in 2017. In search of a vice president to guide the mediation of conflicts, he asked his friend and neighbor Issifou. However, at first Issifou declined. “He told me that he could not do it because of the violence,”⁷ Antoine said laughingly, while Issifou sat next to us, timidly smiling, as he always does when unsure what to say. At the time of Antoine's request, Issifou himself had been a regular victim of rustling and had supported establishing a Koglweogo group for the Kouba neighborhood. However, he himself struggled over the prospect of his joining a vigilante group that exercised violence against his own community. “Everyone has dignity . . . you have to protect it, keep it. If you trample on it, it's not good,”⁸ Issifou explained to me on another occasion. He was worried that the Koglweogo's punishments would humiliate people and harm their integrity. He had no doubt about the Koglweogo's good intentions but was concerned about the damage and tragic outcomes their punishments might cause. Furthermore, as we shall see further in this article, he was worried about how this would affect his own relationships within the neighborhood.

Antoine did not give up after Issifou declined his request. As the group's founder, he was responsible for recruiting suitable persons for each position and had to make sure that the group intervened responsibly and moderately to maintain good relations with the people of the community. With this in mind, Issifou, who proved to be a sensitive and morally conscious character, was the ideal candidate, especially for the role of vice president, as he would have decision-making power over retribution and punishment. Antoine was convinced that he would exert this power with a cool head and with care and therefore de-escalate rather than exacerbate the crisis between the conflicting parties. To convince Issifou, Antoine summoned him as often as possible when they caught a thief in the neighborhood: “I told him to shackle the thief, but Issifou said, “No, I can't do it.” So I did it for him. The next time, the same thing. But bit by bit I showed him, and in the end he accepted.”⁹

Antoine therefore slowly introduced and familiarized Issifou with the group's use of violence. He led him to see for himself that the Koglweogo's violent methods were limited to certain practices, like shackling and whipping, and that criminals were not treated too harshly or disrespectfully. Another aspect that may have convinced Issifou is his realization that he could leave the violent part of these procedures in the hands of others. During my research in Kouba, he didn't engage much in coercive measures, like the shackling of thieves, nor in inflicting punishments. This continuing reluctance indicated that his moral ambiguity about the group's violent practices never fully dissolved. Being a vigilante remained awkward for him, catching him between protecting the community against crime and sticking to his personal moral ideals.

Issifou's responsibilities as a father further complicated the situation for him. “If I were to go home with my Koglweogo uniform and leave it in my house,” he said, “my wife would take it outside and throw it away.”¹⁰ Issifou's wife Salimata is not against the Koglweogo. Her family also profits from the decrease in crime in Kouba. However, whether one generally agrees with a vigilante group in the neighborhood or actively engages in it makes a big difference. She knows how ambivalently the community evaluates the Koglweogo and that Issifou's decision to join the group risked his and his family's safety. After all, becoming a Koglweogo could turn a wide range of judgments and viewpoints against him and his family, torpedo their moral standing, and make them possible targets of revenge and exclusion. In the most severe case, a suspect may be hurt too severely or even die from the injuries. Such incidents can lead to the arrest of Koglweogo members by the police, meaning a loss of income and a great shame for the family.

The case shows how becoming a vigilante links the social, political, and intimate domains of Issifou's ordinary life anew. By night, metaphorically speaking, he is a Koglweogo, but by day he works in the market, sells livestock, and cares for his family. He has multiple social roles and responsibilities as a neighbor, colleague, father, and friend, and cannot reasonably exercise violence recklessly, nor be ignorant of other people's judgments. Rather, due to his own relations and positionality within the community, he himself needed to be convinced that the Koglweogo only act violently in a limited and responsible way. Therefore, Issifou's story offers a nuanced glimpse into the personal trajectory of being recruited into a violent vigilante group. He shows us that violent vigilantes in Ouagadougou neither abandon their moral values nor pursue a more radical moral vision but struggle to maintain moral personhood despite it. By becoming a vigilante, Issifou sacrificed some of his moral ideals and wandered to the edge of personal moral failure, with all the perilous potentialities this entailed for his personal life and his family.

Issifou's struggle also helps us recognize vigilantism as a personal project of moral transformation, one which not only leads to ambiguous moral reflections but also affords actors to overstep their moral ideals and change their judgment of what they think they ought to do. In moments of collectively perceived moral crises (Zigon 2023), the moral transformation of self does thus not necessarily mean moving toward being better or an ideal conception of how one should live (Mattingly 2013: 311). Rather, the case of Issifou shows us how people's moral striving to do their “best good” can mean doing something they actually consider “bad” (see also Vigh 2017) and enduring this tension.

Behind the seemingly coherent facade of vigilante groups, we can thus find a shifting spectrum of personal moral experiences, principles, and judgments. In the next section, I show how this spectrum further complicates the moral project of vigilantism, which is, after all, a group project that needs to settle on certain rules for the treatment and punishment of prisoners.

“You okay, little one?”: Violence as a Contingent Moral Practice

“Everyone has his heart,” Antoine said with incorruptible conviction. Like Issifou, he referred to the dignity of each individual. “It is not good to beat someone too harshly. Sadly, not everyone sees it like this.”¹¹ That day, he explained the reason for a loud discussion I had witnessed between himself and Mohammed, one of the wibega (patrollers). Their quarrel had arisen over the case of a 15-year-old boy, an apprentice fitter. He had stolen an engine from his boss to install it into his old but fancy sky-blue motorbike, which had white clouds painted all over it. After his uncle passed by to talk to and reprove the boy, he agreed that the Koglweogo should take him under their wing for a couple of days. A prisoner with his skills was useful. During his stay, the Koglweogo made him remove and re-install the stolen engine and then repair some of their own motorbikes. After the boy had spent his first night in their prison, I and the group's president Augustin, who only visited the premises sporadically, noticed how stiffly he moved. He was obviously in pain. Augustin asked him, “You okay, little one?” and pulled up his T-shirt, which revealed deep wounds on his back. My knees softened. The boy had been whipped severely—too severely—and we worried he might get an infection.

When Antoine arrived later that day and saw the wounds, he got mad at Mohammed. As previously mentioned, as the group's founder he feels responsible for how criminals are treated and punished by the other members. He knows that the group's and thus its members’ reputation relies heavily on their ability to apply an appropriate measure of violence with criminals, especially because they are often not strangers but people with parents, siblings, children, friends, and colleagues in the area. Even in cases like that of the boy, whose uncle obviously welcomed the Koglweogo's intervention to teach him a lesson, he would certainly disapprove if his nephew ended up in hospital or was sent home with severe injuries. Hurting a suspect too brutally can thus put the group's good relationship with the neighborhood at risk and, as described earlier, can even affect the personal lives of Koglweogo members and their families themselves.

This example illustrates the need to understand vigilantism as a conflictual moral project in which the question of how to exercise violence in a “good” way is a matter of ongoing negotiation. Furthermore, my work in three different city districts revealed that the leadership of each Koglweogo group also shapes how strictly the limits of violence are defined and controlled. The Koglweogo in Pagan, for instance, were generally more prone to use violence and also had a greater variety of punishments than the group in Somgandé. The Kouba group, on the other hand, was ultimately shut down in 2022 after someone died in their prison, which made the quarrel between Antoine and Mohammed appear like a dark prediction. Despite Antoine's success in recruiting Issifou and thus providing his group with a moderate leadership, they could not contain the destructive potentialities of their violence.

However, while the shutting down of the Kouba group tells a different story, the fight between Antoine and Mohammed illustrates how differently vigilantes judge each other's violent acts and how challenging it is for vigilante groups to uphold the moral limits of their violence. Koglweogo members may generally agree that crimes should be punished, while their internal moral differences can never be fully resolved. Depending on the crime, the person punished, and the relationship of the conflicting parties, the extent of a violent act can create a sense of righteousness for some members and of moral failure for others. It therefore remains a potential source of tension between the different groups and members within groups.

These findings suggest that the violent acts of the Koglweogo are “laboratory moments” (Mattingly 2013: 318) in which they experiment with the moral boundaries of inflicting bodily harm on others. In those moments, it is quite difficult for them to define, maintain, and obey the internally generated distinctions between “good” and “bad” violence. In this vein, the case of Kouba demonstrates that the morality of vigilante violence is not based on clearly defined moral imperatives (e.g., Pratten 2008a) but always remains contingent. Even when vigilantes try to determine moral limitations and rules for their punishments, they can be reinterpreted and manipulated by individual members and quickly circumvented the moment the violence is actually acted out (see Collins 2008). This moral contingency of violence is also a possible clarification for why vigilante orders, like other configurations of collective violence, rarely survive long-term. As the next section will show, their violent acts are always prone to be evaluated as immoral acts of humiliation and atrocity (see also Fassin 2013) both within and outside the groups, which weakens their claim to public authority. As a group, moreover, they also struggle to harmonize their moral judgments of what it means to exercise violence in the “best good” way (Mattingly 2013) and have difficulties with relying on the other members’ efforts to comply with the already ephemeral rules of violence.

“One day, they'll come here”: Integrating Citizen's Moral Claims

Attuning internal moral divergences and binding them to certain limits of violence are decisive in how the Koglweogo are evaluated as a functional institution of conflict management by Burkinabé citizens. During conflict mediation, accusers, accused, witnesses, and relatives carefully observe against whom, when, and why they use violence, how far they go to coerce the suspected truth, how they treat their prisoners, and what efforts they make to find proper retribution. Yet, depending on the observers’ positionality and personal moral experience, they do not always come to the same judgments of right and wrong and have different ideas of what is the “best good” (Mattingly 2013) that the Koglweogo ought to do. Some people, like the boy's uncle in the case described earlier, may expect the Koglweogo to punish his nephew, at least to a certain limit, to give him a moral lesson. Another person may evaluate the punishment as unjustified because the boy is just a child. Some approve of the Koglweogo for inflicting violence on crime, while others fully reject them for using physical violence in the first place. This spectrum of moral evaluation and judgment is always in flux and, as we shall see with the following two examples, requires the Koglweogo to continuously recreate their moral project.

One significant change in their code of conduct concerned the Koglweogo's manner of responding to cases of crime. In their early days, they interfered when they heard about a crime and tracked down accused persons in their workplaces and homes. This approach engendered criticism among the citizens. When I asked a truck driver for his opinion about the Koglweogo, he complained: “They made a lot of noise, knocked on my friend's door, and carted him off in front of everyone. This is not good. It causes too much damage. And he was not even guilty.”¹² At the time, my impression was that such complaints had already multiplied. More than a year later, Antoine told me that the Koglweogo had adjusted their manner of intervention when I asked him how they handle their critics by saying: “We wait. One day, they'll come here. The day they'll encounter a problem.”¹³ Over the years, waiting became a decisive double strategy for the Koglweogo. On the one hand, they are now waiting for people to actively demand their intervention. On the other hand, they give accused persons a call and wait for them to come to the premises on their own, giving them a chance to save face by not being tracked down. Instead of forcing themselves onto others, the Koglweogo have therefore adopted a passive attitude to intervention, which is how they try to be seen as “good” neighbors who want to help, rather than violent villains who relentlessly impose their order on others. In a way, the practice of waiting cultivates a reputation for moral integrity, respect, and modesty.

Another example of how the Koglweogo have integrated citizens’ moral judgments concerns their distribution of violent (audio)visual content. In the first years after their emergence, many groups performed the punishments theatrically for public display and recorded them for social media. Their most common explanation for this practice was the fear it produced among the criminals, but to me it also indicated that they lacked the power to punish people behind closed doors. People were suspicious of the punishments, and hiding them would have exacerbated this mistrust. Their recordings, therefore, provided a sense of public control and transparency. Yet, over the years, citizens increasingly regarded the recording of captured suspects and their punishments as immoral because it showed a prisoner being humiliated in a static representation. “It is ashaming. It destroys the name of the person,”¹⁴ Zarata concluded during a motorbike ride, which was the best time to discuss these sensitive issues. She was convinced that the recordings caused prisoners lasting harm and shame from which they were unable to recover. In her view, the punishments themselves may be a necessary evil, but causing a person's name permanent damage was wrong. In 2021, the Koglweogos’ national leader, Rassamkandé, responded to this widespread concern by prohibiting the recording of captured suspects. After this change in the code of conduct, the Koglweogo only produced videos of suspects for internal use. Their violence, as well as the faces and identities of the alleged criminals, disappeared from the public scene.

These examples illustrate how Koglweogo groups pursue an integrative moral project that tries to become attuned to citizens’ shifting moral evaluations. As I have shown thus far, they therefore not only respond flexibly to the individual moral crises each case of crime affords (Zigon 2023), but also make efforts to reflect and change the internal rules and procedures of their violent intervention in agreement with public judgments. Here again, vigilantism emerges as a “laboratory” (Mattingly 2013) in which actors experiment with the moral boundaries of violence in reaction to the changing moral claims of their social surroundings. Those claims, as my conversations with the truck driver and Zarata reveal, are closely tied to the degrees of shame, stigmatization, and humiliation that are imposed on criminals. Thus, even if people consider criminal acts immoral and punishable, the violent action against these crimes must follow certain paths and logics so that they do not fall into the realm of malevolence and immorality themselves. This tightrope walking means that violent vigilantes always have to work not “with the odds but against them” (ibid.: 309). It is impossible for them to cultivate and maintain public support by relentlessly following a moral path they have set out for themselves. Rather, the case of the Koglweogo makes us see how vigilantes constantly have to strive toward moral adequacy in a highly dynamic landscape of changing moods and judgments. After all, especially from a distance, it is much more difficult to convince others that a violent act is “good” or restorative rather than destructive and cruel.

Conclusion

In this article, I have drawn on Zigon (2023) and Mattingly (2013) to explore the ordinary moral life of violent vigilantes in urban Ouagadougou. In doing so, I have tried to show that the Koglweogo do not impose their fixed notion of moral order on others. Rather, in the face of the intimate nature of crime in Burkina Faso, they need to be flexible in seeking adequate responses to the moral expectations and interpersonal moral crises of those demanding their intervention. I thereby challenge the assumption that vigilante groups have a homogenous notion of moral order and demonstrate instead that they struggle over the moral limits of “good” and “bad” violence. On the one hand, these moral struggles emerge in vigilante's personal trajectories, who risk their and their family's moral standing in the community and have moral doubts about joining a violent group. On the other hand, vigilantes come into internal conflict over how to punish crime in the “best good” manner while at the same time trying to adapt their violent routines to the moral claims and criticisms raised by citizens.

Based on those findings, I argue that vigilantism is a dynamic and conflictual moral project that experiments with the restorative possibilities and moral limits of punishing criminals. Put more simply, the Koglweogo try to exercise violence in a way that they themselves and others can live with. They have no clear blueprint of how to be violent and yet moral selves but have to re-negotiate and question their violent procedures and strategies of intervention on a regular basis. As such, vigilante violence isn't a practice following moral imperatives or cultural codes but is deeply contingent, evolving and transforming through ordinary moments of reflection and doubt, trial and error.

I would like to conclude with three more general claims. First, the moral dynamics within Koglweogo groups add a nuanced explanation for why vigilantism tends to be a short-lived political project (Abrahams 2020). Those dynamics suggest that many vigilante groups fail to align the diverging moral judgments among their members and reorganize their violence in response to the shifting expectations and conditions in communities. Second, the Koglweogo's mediation of crimes among those who are familiar to one another shows that although vigilantes may be the implementors of violence, they are not necessarily seen as the main people responsible for any harm caused by particular punishments. This insight accentuates the meaning and power of third persons but also blurs the assumed boundaries between perpetrator and victim in violent situations, which also emphasizes the sociality of vigilante violence. Third, my research highlights how fragile and conflictual the logic of violence is in situations where it appears to be collective. Even though the violence of “mobs,” “gangs,” and “clans” seems organized and morally consensual, it is also closely tied to the internal dynamics of authority and easily becomes a source of conflict and personal compromise. My findings suggest that the violent groups’ internally defined limits of where and how one enters and leaves the intersubjective spaces of “good” and “evil” are neither evident nor ever complete, but an important matter for investigation. More research on the moral trajectories, negotiations, and conflicts behind the facades of violent groups can allow us to better understand the dynamics of organized violence and how it evolves.