Africa & Global Power

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regarded as the core of its Sahel security architecture: Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger had all expelled French forces, withdrawn from ECOWAS, formed the Alliance of Sahel States, and signed security cooperation agreements with Russia.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...

B etween August 2020 and July 2023, four West African governments were removed by their own armies. Mali fell twice. Burkina Faso fell twice. Guinea and Niger each fell once. Eight coups in three years, in a region that had spent two decades building the institutional architecture of democratic governance. The question worth asking is not why the soldiers moved. The question is why so few people in those countries tried to stop them. The answer is uncomfortable for the international community that invested in elections, constitutions, and multiparty systems across the Sahel since the 1990s. Democratic institutions failed not because Africans do not want democracy. They failed because the governments those institutions produced delivered almost nothing to the populations they governed. The coups were the symptom. The governance collapse was the disease. The Four Takeovers: A Timeline of Institutional Failure Mali’s first coup in August 2020 removed President Ibrahim Boubacar Keït...