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The Sahel's "Coup Belt": An Indicator of Global Political Realignments?

  • Viandito Pasaribu (Staff Writer)
  • Apr 13
  • 11 min read

Introduction


Africa’s Sahel region has come under increased interest from global powers in

recent years due to various strategic factors and political instability. Historically, the

region’s states have been key partners of Western powers – notably France and the

United States – in their push to exert their influence on the continent. However, the

Sahel states from Guinea to Sudan have experienced a spate of military coup d’états

that have drastically altered the balance of power in the region. For example, three

states of the Western Sahel have formed a confederation, the Alliance of Sahel

States, in opposition to ECOWAS, West Africa’s preeminent intergovernmental

union. The term “Coup Belt” has come to the fore in the discourse regarding the

region since 2020, due to the concentration of coups in a geographical line. As

argued by Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2020, p.77), this crisis must be understood within the

shifting orders of the modern world-system. The wave of coups has signalled two

key trends: disillusionment with French intervention in the region and a growing

distrust in civilian democracies to deliver economic development or social mobility.

Space has therefore opened up for military leaders who invoke anti-colonial

legitimacy and collective material welfare. Examining the Sahel through political,

environmental, and discursive lenses reveals its leaders’ struggle for control and

agency amidst a changing global order. Since the military governments have shown

surprising resilience and have aligned themselves in opposition to Western powers,

this essay posits that the “Coup Belt” phenomenon represents a regional

manifestation of global geopolitical realignments, caused by a variety of factors.



The political, social, and environmental contexts of the Sahel

region


The suite of military coups that swept through the Sahel states between 2020

and 2023 emerged in part through a volatile convergence of domestic political

failures, deep-seated social fragmentation, and environmental collapse. Terrorist

attacks by Al-Qaeda and Islamic state affiliates intensified dramatically, with more

than 4,000 deaths reported across Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger in 2019 alone

(United Nations, 2020), as civilian governments proved unable to maintain

sovereignty over vast rural territories where insurgent groups exercised effective

control. Military leaders capitalized on this disillusionment, claiming themselves as

more capable of suppressing the region-wide insurgency than their civilian

predecessors. Crucially, the juntas have shifted their alliances toward non-Western

powers like Russia, China, and Turkey, that offer military hardware, mercenary

forces, and diplomatic support without the perceived paternalism of French

counterterrorism missions (Murphy, 2023). Over 1’000 Russian paramilitaries are

now present in Mali, exchanging security cooperation for gold mining concessions

and geopolitical influence (Nossiter, 2025), while China has deepened its economic

footprint through infrastructure investments tied to resource extraction most visibly in

Guinea (Nikkei Asia, 2025). The Sahel also represents a fraught meeting point

between Islamic and traditional belief systems, and between pastoral and sedentary

communities, divisions that militant groups have exploited. Violent extremist

organizations have systematically targeted local religious leaders, land chiefs, and

village heads traditional authorities whose moral legitimacy once enabled peaceful

resolution of resource disputes, assassinating, threatening, or displacing them to

impose their own governance systems (Demuynck and Coleman, 2022). This social

unraveling has created a justification for military rule: only centralized, coercive state

power, the juntas argue, can suppress insurgencies that civilian democracy proved

incapable of containing. Environmentally, the Sahel has become a case study in

climate injustice, bearing the consequences of a crisis for which it bears negligible

responsibility while lacking the adaptive capacity to respond. Temperatures in the

region have risen 1.5 times faster than the global average, accelerating

desertification at an estimated 11,000 square kilometers per year and degrading

approximately 80 percent of the region’s farmland (Eboreime et al., 2025). Erratic

rainfall patterns have led to pasture-destroying droughts as well as heavy flooding,

including one that displaced 1.3 million Nigerians (Al Jazeera, 2022). Shrinking

grazing lands and water sources force herders onto farmlands, triggering violent

clashes that climate modeling shows increase by 54 percent for every 1°C

temperature rise in regions where herders and farmers coexist (Eberle et al., 2020).

Militant groups may exploit these environmental grievances, positioning themselves

as protectors of marginalized herding communities against corrupt state officials and

foreign interests, while state-led counterterrorism responses further militarize

resource access, criminalizing traditional grazing routes and eroding the customary

dispute-resolution mechanisms that once enabled coexistence (International Crisis

Group, 2022). Such conditions help serve both to erode the legitimacy of democratic

governments, while encouraging popular support for heavy-handed alternatives from

institutions such as the military, which in states like Burkina Faso, may assume the

mantle as the champion of the downtrodden thanks to past precedent and the

corruption of the entrenched political elite.



The positionality of the “Coup Belt” in the international order


The positionality of the Sahel region within the contemporary global order is

defined by a fundamental contradiction: the region is simultaneously of great

geostrategic value and yet perenially politically unstable. Furthermore, its

development remains constrained by legacies of extraversion by its elites and

external intervention by foreign powers. Geographically, the Sahel occupies an

importantl position at the top of Sub-Saharan Africa, serving as both a corridor for

the trafficking of arms, drugs, and people, as well as a frontline in operations against

Islamist insurgencies, This has led to intensified foreign military involvement in the

region, most notably the French Operation Barkhane and US-led Operation Juniper

Shield (Gogny and De Castro, 2025, p.246). Another important aspect of the Sahel’s

positionality in the global order is its material wealth, especially in precious metals.

The Sahelian states sit atop a large concentration of critical mineral reserves:

Guinea alone possesses more than one-quarter of the world’s bauxite reserves (Li,

2025), while Niger remains a major uranium supplier to European nuclear energy

markets (Melly, 2024), and Burkina Faso has emerged as one of Africa's

fastest-growing gold producers, with output exceeding 70 metric tons annually

(World Gold Council, 2025). Despite this wealth, the legacy of intermediary rule

through elites during the colonial period has historically reproduced a political

economy of extraction and the emergence of a comprador bourgeoisie, who use

their access to outside powers to channel resource revenues outward, rather than

inward through development. This is what is termed “extraversion” by postcolonial

scholar Jean-François Bayart (2000), and leaves the local populations mired in

poverty and local institutions viable for capture by elites (Boas and Strazzari, 2020).

This structure is in large part a product of French colonization, which reorganized

Sahelian societies into extractive peripheries of the metropole. French West Africa

was deliberately administered through indirect rule that empowered compliant elites

while dismantling pre-existing structures of accountability. The strategy was

designed to minimize resource commitment while maximizing resource extraction

(Cooper, 2015). France’s regional relations are now marked by a web of neo-colonial

arrangements – monetary ties through the CFA franc, defense agreements, and

informal networks of economic patronage – that ensured Sahel states would remain

within Paris's orbit (Chafer et al., 2020). Political survival thus depends less on

domestic legitimacy and more on the capacity to broker economic and military

arrangements beneficial to French interests. The result is the formation of a deeply

unstable postcolonial state, where institutions serve the elite rather than the public

good, and where cultural and religious diversity has frequently been instrumentalized

by elites to foment communal violence for political control (Bøås & Torheim, 2013).



Foreign involvement in the Sahel and human rights debates


The withdrawal of French military forces from the Sahel has not produced a

vacuum but rather a reconfiguration of power that has once again brought to light the

tension between the individual civic rights associated with liberal democracy and the

collective material rights promised by the developmentalist state. Since their

independence, Sahelian states have functioned as "gatekeeper states," (Cooper,

2018) or post-colonial entities that only effictively control nodes of commercial

activity such as cities, ports, and mines, while exercising limited sovereignty over

their hinterlands, with the state’s power derived from managing access to external

resources and international validation rather than from domestic legitimacy.

Positioned solidly in the periphery of Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems theory,

these nations have been structurally dependent on the extraction of critical resources

in exchange for security interventions and development aid that has yet to deliver

lasting stability. The result has been an inability of the state, whether under

democratic or military rule, to provide individual civic rights such as due process, free

expression, and free political participation. Of course, the promise of military

governments to deliver collective material rights often rests on violent coercion. As

Human Rights Watch (2026) has documented, the military juntas currently ruling

Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger have responded to legitimate grievances by

dramatically shrinking civic space, forcibly disappearing political figures, arbitrarily

arresting journalists, and committing mass killings of civilians under the guise of

counterterrorism. (Ibid, 2024) Russian forces in Mali have massacred hundreds of

civilians in Moura, seized gold mines, and treated African partners with open racism

while failing to halt advances toward major cities like Bamako. The Sahel, then, has

so far presented a harsh dichotomy between a failed liberal internationalism that

never secured individual rights and an illiberal nationalism that promises collective

prosperity while delivering mass atrocity, leaving citizens trapped between two

different forms of predation, each justified by a conflict of rights dating back to the

Cold War. In the context of the eclipse of the Françafrique system, academic and

political discourse on the Sahel has been dominated by three primary issues. The

first concerns democratic backsliding: the military governments of Mali, Burkina

Faso, and Niger have retrenched and sought to form an alternative defense network

in the Alliance of Sahel States, prompting foreign observers to proclaim the "coup

belt" stretching from the Atlantic to the Red Sea (The Guardian, 2023). The dominant

view in Western circles insists upon safeguarding democracy despite the difficulty of

the region's civilian governments to deliver security, social justice, or economic

prosperity. The second anxiety centers on geopolitical displacement: Western

policymakers express acute fear of increasing Chinese and Russian influence, as

the paramilitary Wagner Group (now absorbed into Russia’s Ministry of Defense as

the Africa Corps) has expanded into the Sahel, replacing French forces and securing

mining concessions in exchange for security guarantees in Mali (Shoer, 2024).

Underscoring the importance of such a realignment, rather than the promotion of

democracy, to the West, the United States and France have been willing to accept

continued military rule in Chad, where the ascendance of son of friendly former

strongman Idriss Deby to the presidency was welcomed by their governments

(Wilén, 2025) The third and most intriguing dimension is the stark divergence

between this discourse and popular reception within the Sahel itself. This challenge

finds concrete expression in the widespread popular support across Africa for

Burkina Faso's Ibrahim Traoré, who is celebrated by politically active youth not as an

usurper but as a nationalist in the vein of Thomas Sankara, building an alternative to

neo-colonialism and a stronger, more benevolent postcolonial state (Mbachu, 2025).

The lesson to be learned here is that preventing coups in Africa will require a great

shift of approaches to relations with its key actors, including “answering hard moral

questions about coups, including whether they are all necessarily bad as the

dominant view suggests" (Suleiman, 2021). The Sahel's current political climate

demands moving beyond Eurocentric frameworks of democratic normativity to

grapple with the region's peripheral position within the global system, its own moral

paradigms, and its unique socioeconomic realities, wherein the coup d'état may be

viewed not as a break from democracy but as a desperate, if deeply ambiguous,

practice of decolonization.



Conclusion


In light of the current trend towards realignment towards non-Western powers

exhibited by the Sahel states, the rise of the term “Coup Belt” could therefore be

seen as an expression of anxiety in the West to the retreat of liberal democracy and

the increasing influence of competing powers in the Sahel region, being illustrative of

the growth of a multipolar international order. It is revelatory of a desire to sound the

alarm of a potentially growing geopolitical bloc opposed to Western interests, in a

similar derogatory vein the terms “Iron Curtain” and “domino effect” had been used in

the days of the existential bipolar conflict of the Cold War. In condemning the events

occuring in the Sahel as a string of military takeovers, it serves also to reveal a need

to protect democratic states and defend the liberal model among its advocates. Yet,

it remains a useful catch-all term to illustrate the growth of authoritarian “big man”

regimes. But it also proves its inability to capture the nuances of military government

in the region, from Guinea and Mali, to Chad and Sudan, and demonstrates the

importance of considering the states’ unique positionalities and ability to determine

their own agencies within their singular contexts, despite the overarching global

developments and generalizations of those with outsiders’ positions on Africa.



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