The Sahel Security Complex: Rethinking Regional Architecture

The Sahel has become the epicentre of the world's fastest-growing security crisis. A decade of military intervention, externally financed stabilisation and successive state-building programmes has failed to reverse the spread of armed groups across Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger — and the military transitions of recent years have reordered the region's external alignments.

The limits of the old architecture

Frameworks designed for inter-state conflict have proved poorly suited to a landscape of mobile, networked insurgencies that exploit weak governance, contested borders and local grievance. The withdrawal of long-standing partners and the unravelling of the G5 Sahel have left a coordination vacuum that newer arrangements have yet to fill.

Security responses that privilege kinetic operations over the restoration of basic services have repeatedly produced short-lived gains. Where the state returns only as a garrison, insurgent governance fills the vacuum it leaves behind.

Toward a Sahelian settlement

A durable architecture must be African-led, locally legitimate and development-anchored. That means investing in border-community resilience, decoupling counter-terrorism finance from political conditionality that the transitional governments now reject, and creating regional mechanisms that can survive changes of government. The report argues for a flexible coalition model built around shared intelligence, demobilisation pathways and cross-border economic integration rather than a single, brittle institution.