Africa & Global Power

  T hirty days ago, this series began with a question that Africa & Global Power was built to answer honestly: what is actually happening on this continent, why is it happening, and what does it mean for the 1.5 billion people living through it? The question sounds simple. The answers, as thirty days of analysis have shown, are anything but. We have covered sovereign debt and brain drain, regional integration and electoral manipulation, critical minerals and the Iran war, demographic transition and technology funding winters, the collapse of Françafrique and the ambitions of the Global South. Each post was an attempt at the same thing: to take a consequential African subject and examine it with the honesty it deserves, without the condescension of crisis journalism, the dishonesty of boosterism, or the laziness of treating a continent of fifty-four countries and 1.5 billion people as a single story. This final post is not a summary. It is a synthesis: an attempt to identify...

I n August 2022, the last French Barkhane troops withdrew from Mali after nine years of counterterrorism operations against jihadist groups across the Sahel. In December 2023, France closed its last military base in Niger, expelled after the July 2023 coup brought a military junta to power that had made the removal of French forces a central political demand. [1] By early 2025, France retained no permanent military presence in any of the three countries it had regarded as the core of its Sahel security architecture: Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger had all expelled French forces, withdrawn from ECOWAS, formed the Alliance of Sahel States, and signed security cooperation agreements with Russia. This is not a minor diplomatic setback. It is the most significant collapse of French strategic influence in West Africa since decolonisation, and it has happened within a period of roughly three years. Understanding what produced it, what has replaced it, and what the consequences are for region...