Hafed Al-Ghwell
West Africa and the Sahel are experiencing a disturbing trend of political instability, coups, and the rise of violent extremist groups. The region is plagued by serious challenges, including weak governance, economic decline, and insecurity.
The persistence and growing strength of harmful actors in the Sahel, the area that runs across Africa between the Sahara to the north and the savannas of Sudan to the south, threaten to exacerbate the crisis and spread mayhem across the continent.
It is raising concerns that West Africa, despite its purported commitment to democracy and stability, is settling into a familiar pattern of repeated failures and inaction, resulting in entrenched insecurity across the Sahel.
The region, stretching from Senegal in the west to Eritrea in the east, has long faced severe security challenges. A confluence of factors, from weak and illegitimate governance to the worsening effects of climate change, are contributing to the rise of violent extremism.
Left unchecked, agitators in the Sahel appear eager to expand south toward coastal West African countries, raising fears that they will eventually establish footholds there. Such expansions will likely be facilitated by a lack of foreign involvement and increased cooperation among malign actors with shared interests, such as extremist groups and transnational criminal organizations.
Far from being immune to this tumult in the Sahel, many governments in neighboring countries face a potent cocktail of civil-military frictions, escalating public discontent, and a crop of foreign partners all-too content to overlook military rule in favor of bolstering narrowly defined security interests.
The gravity of these conditions cannot be overstated; they leave an already fragile region in a precarious position, ripe for the picking by opportunistic actors. Future coup leaders will boldly calculate that the intense competition and prevailing power plays among global actors and increasingly assertive middle powers can provide a buffer, easing any international backlash they might face after a power grab.
This incessant drumbeat of coups past, present, and future underscores a regional crisis that is neither transient nor superficial but rather symptomatic of deep-rooted grievances and a sense of disillusionment with political processes that have either stalled or failed to deliver on their promises.
This pattern of instability, fueled by stagnant economies, persistent insecurity, and a crisis of legitimacy, begs an urgent examination of the West’s role in all this, and its heavily security-oriented approaches to challenges that are fundamentally political and social in nature.
Within this context, coups in West Africa and the Sahel, four of which have been successfully executed since 2020, do not emerge from a vacuum but are reflective of broader regional disenchantment.
Yet it is the specter of insecurity in particular that has served as a rallying cry for military juntas, which justify their usurpation of power on the grounds that elected governments have failed to protect and provide for their citizens. Such claims resonate not only in the barracks but on the streets, where often significant public support for coups reflects a populace more concerned with the outcomes of governance than the form it takes.
The disillusion among the public is compounded by the glaring spotlight cast on unforced failures of governance, which is intensified through the lens of social media by an increasingly educated and engaged youth demographic. Public angst in turn fuels relentless demands for accountability and transparency, given the acute scarcity of resources, high levels of poverty, lack of basic services, increased competition for natural resources, intercommunal tensions, and mass displacement.
When this fails to address or assuage long-term grievances, what comes next is a marked tolerance for violent excesses perpetrated by opportunistic actors.
Such violent decline into permanent insecurity is also a reflection of negative sentiments toward perceived neocolonial influences, which have resulted in fraught relationships with former colonial powers, in particular France. Despite having the advantage of enduring historical ties to the region, authorities in the country have been unable to halt the rise of anti-French sentiment stemming from unmet expectations for economic prosperity and stability.
A few Sahelian and West African countries are in the process of pivoting away from former colonial hegemons, denoting an irreversible shift in alliances and partnerships at the expense of the underlying pillars of democracy: robust institutions, rule of law, and economic development.
By fueling these disconcerting developments, countries such as Russia have seized on the opportunities afforded by such strife to provide both rhetorical backing and, in some instances, substantive support to local actors contemplating regime change.
Such calculated opportunism among external forces cleverly exploits worsening vulnerabilities and stokes the fires of instability to erode the capacities of threatened countries to guard against violent takeovers and maintain the integrity of their hard-fought democratic institutions.
Even more frustratingly, several Western partners have implicitly endorsed these recurrent coups, prioritizing their own core security interests in the region. Schemes designed to stem flows of migrants, contain geopolitical adversaries, and secure counterterrorism gains, while critical, have come at the expense, alarmingly, of longer-term investments in democracy and governance.
This myopic focus sets a dangerous precedent, fueling a cycle of instability in the region and inadvertently propagating a “coup contagion” that has the potential to resonate far beyond West Africa and the Sahel, potentially sowing seeds of discord even in North Africa.
The subtext is clear: The international community is not merely a passive observer in West Africa’s current crisis and the subsequent contagion that will likely endanger North African countries as well. It remains a fractious participant that refuses to reform its approach, thereby enabling mounting crises that are beginning to cause regional institutions to fray, hampering their ability to develop effective regional security responses.
Last year, for instance, juntas in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger formed an alliance to resist the pressure they were coming under from the Economic Community of West African States, historically one of the most consistent organizations in efforts to uphold anti-coup norms in the region.
Regional organizations such as this can prove instrumental in their roles as convening, coordinating, and overseeing agents that can provide help to countries such Ivory Coast, where jihadist groups have been steadily encroaching on its borders.
Crippling ECOWAS will undoubtedly result in coastal West Africa slowly becoming the next Sahel as a result of persistent political upheaval, with the potential for crises to spill over into sub-Saharan Africa and north toward the Maghreb.
The West’s historical predilection for security-centric interventions, at the expense of support for genuine democratic governance and efforts to address the root causes of economic and political disenchantment, might not only fail to stem the tide of unrest but could, indeed, exacerbate the very conditions that cause the erosion of democratic institutions.
In the face of this burgeoning crisis, a recalibration of policies and priorities is required, with an emphasis on long-term, structural support for democracy that transcends mere election observers or military engagement.
