The insecurity affecting the Central Sahel did not begin with jihadist organizations or foreign military intervention. It developed from long-standing problems of weak governance, political marginalization, and uneven state presence. In many peripheral areas, limited access to public services, justice, and protection weakened trust in state institutions, while perceptions of exclusion and repression further undermined state legitimacy.
These conditions created an environment in which local grievances could develop into wider conflict. Mali provides a clear example. Tuareg communities in northern Mali have a long history of grievances towards the central government, including over political representation for the centre, and skewed development and distribution of state resources. Repeated rebellions and military responses deepened distrust between northern communities and the state. These tensions formed part of the wider crisis of 2012, when a Tuareg-led rebellion, the collapse of government control in the north and a military coup in Bamako combined to produce a profound political and security breakdown.
The resulting vacuum created openings for jihadist organizations to expand, but it was only one part of a broader conflict involving separatist movements and other armed actors with different objectives. As state authority weakened, these groups exploited existing grievances and gaps in governance. Jihadism therefore did not create the crisis. It became embedded within an existing breakdown of state authority, local political relations, and competing forms of armed mobilization.
The Rise of Counterterrorism
The expansion of jihadist organizations created a genuine and increasingly serious security threat, but it also changed how the wider crisis was understood. As armed groups expanded their presence, insecurity became increasingly framed through the language of terrorism and counterterrorism. This narrative provided the foundation for an expanding international presence in the region. France, as the principal external security actor, alongside the United States and European institutions, supported Sahelian governments through military operations, intelligence, training and security assistance.
These interventions increased the governments’ capacity to confront jihadist organizations, but they also reinforced a model in which insecurity was primarily approached as a problem of military containment. The expansion of counterterrorism operations further militarized the region, while abuses by security forces could themselves contribute to the persistence of violence. Unlawful killings and other abuses could fuel recruitment by armed groups, creating a cycle in which efforts to contain insecurity risked generating further grievances and violence.
Furthermore, the emphasis on military capacity did little to resolve the political weaknesses at the heart of the crisis. External security support could give governments greater capacity to confront armed groups while reducing the urgency of addressing weak institutions, limited access to justice and strained relationships with peripheral communities. In this sense, the international response risked strengthening the state’s ability to use force without strengthening the political foundations of its authority.
Failure of the Security Structure
The persistence of violence increasingly exposed the political limits of the security model built around external military support. By the early 2020s, continued insecurity had begun to undermine the effectiveness and legitimacy of external security partnerships. This shift became increasingly visible in political rhetoric and public mobilization across the Central Sahel. In Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, civilian demonstrations against French military involvement increasingly linked demands for foreign troop withdrawals to claims of sovereignty and resistance to external interference. Political discourse also invoked neocolonialism, framing Western security partnerships not merely as ineffective but as constraints on national autonomy.
The coups in Mali in 2020 and 2021, Burkina Faso in 2022, and Niger in 2023 accelerated this rupture. The new governments dismantled major elements of the previous security architecture: Mali expelled French forces and requested the termination of MINUSMA’s mandate (the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali, a peacekeeping operation established in 2013); Burkina Faso terminated its defense agreement with France; and Niger demanded the withdrawal of French forces and expelled their ambassador, before subsequently ending its defense agreement with the United States. The coups were not simply a rejection of foreign intervention. They also occurred amid worsening insecurity, dissatisfaction with socio-economic conditions and broader political grievances. The rupture was therefore both a crisis of domestic political authority and a rejection of the dependence on external security partnerships.
Reconfiguring Security
The end of the old security order was soon followed by an attempt to build a new one. The ambition was to make security provision more regional and less dependent on Western-led partnerships. In September 2023, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger established the Alliance of Sahel States (AES), which developed into the Confederation of Sahel States in 2024. The three governments also pursued greater military integration in 2025 through a Unified Force intended to coordinate their armed forces and conduct operations across their territories. The AES sought to shift security provision away from dependence on Western-led partnerships and towards regional cooperation and greater national control. But political autonomy did not automatically translate into military capacity. Years of reliance on Western training, intelligence, equipment, logistics and operational support could not simply be undone by removing Western forces.
This is where Russia enters the picture. As Western forces withdrew, Moscow expanded its security engagement with Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, positioning itself as an alternative external partner to the French and Western presence they had rejected. This did not fundamentally alter the way insecurity was being addressed. As Hannah Rae Armstrong argues, Russia risks repeating a pattern seen under France, relying heavily on military force without addressing the political conditions underlying the conflict. In Mali, where Wagner began operating in 2022, security has continued to deteriorate alongside serious abuses against civilians, while military operations have increasingly become entangled with the grievances that preceded the jihadist insurgency.
Reconfiguration is not Transformation
The trajectory of the Central Sahel suggests that the central problem has never been simply a lack of military capacity. Before jihadist organizations became the dominant security concern, the region was already experiencing political marginalization, contested state authority and local conflicts that national governments struggled to manage. The rise of jihadism transformed the scale and nature of the threat, but it did not erase these underlying issues. Instead, counterterrorism increasingly absorbed them into a security framework in which military force became the principal means of restoring state authority. The result was a growing gap between the expansion of security operations and the improvement of security itself. French and international interventions could disrupt armed groups without resolving the conditions that allowed violence to regenerate, while the post-coup regimes have largely responded to the same problem with even greater reliance on military force.
This makes the emergence of the AES more complicated than either a rejection of the old order or the creation of an entirely new one. The three states have gained greater control over their security partnerships and have built institutions intended to make that autonomy collective. That is a genuine change in the regional security architecture. But sovereignty over security policy does not in itself produce lasting security. If the same conflict is still approached primarily through military force, then the change is largely one of ownership rather than logic.
The implication is not that military force has no place in the Central Sahel. Armed groups pose a real threat, and states require the capacity to protect their populations. But this does not mean it makes political reform interchangeable. Where grievances, local disputes, exclusion and abuses remain unresolved, military operations can suppress violence in one place while creating new grievances elsewhere. The experience of the past decade therefore points towards a more fundamental test of the region’s new security order. Its success will depend not only on whether the AES can build greater military autonomy, but on whether that autonomy is used to address the political conditions that have allowed insecurity to persist. The Central Sahel has already experienced a major reconfiguration of its security architecture. What remains unresolved is whether that reconfiguration can become a transformation of security itself.
