Rahmane Idrissa is a political scientist and historian based at Leiden University’s African Studies Centre and at the LASDEL, in Niamey, where he also heads the Think Tank EPGA. He was trained as a political philosopher at Dakar’s UCAD, and a political scientist in the USA. Aside from numerous articles, book chapters and research studies, Idrissa has published in book form The Politics of Islam in the Sahel: Between Persuasion and Violence (2017); the Historical Dictionary of Niger (2020); and L’Afrique pour les nuls (2015), co-authored with J.-J. Boillot. At the moment, he is working on two monographs, one being a study of the Songhay Empire and the birth of modernity, for the London publisher Allen Lane/Penguin Books; and the other, a sociopolitical history of the decline and fall of “national development” in Niger, on the basis of research funded by the Humboldt Foundation.