Over the last decade, Burkina Faso has become the epicentre of an insurrectional wave that swept through the central Sahel. The label of ‘security crisis’ has justified military ‘solutions’ whose flagrant failure led to radical regional political shifts (Mbembe, 2023) . Within this escalation, dominant narratives gave pastoralists ambivalent roles: ‘watchdogs’ in the peripheries of States in the beginning, core or back-up of the insurgencies soon after (Rangé, Magnani, Ancey, 2020) . This storytelling has underlain the ethnicization of violent conflicts and the perpetuation of ineffective counter-insurgency strategies. Based on the results of a research conducted between 2019 and 2021 in Burkina Faso , we argue that an empirically grounded understanding of the dynamics surrounding pastoralism and its mobilities in this context reveals the deeply political nature of the current situation and allow to envision the ways out of the current impasse.