Risk of isolating ‘Sahel bad guys’: Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger will seek support elsewhere
From left: Mali’s Assimi Goita, Niger’s Abdourahamane Tiani and Burkina Faso’s Ibrahim Traore at the first Alliance of Sahel States summit in Niamey, July 6, 2024.
The Sahel has exposed a strategic weakness in Africa’s continental order. The African Union (AU) used a constitutional instrument against what was, at bottom, a crisis of state authority. It treated the military seizure of power as the decisive rupture when the deeper rupture lay in the weakening of authority across Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger.
The outcome followed from that misreading. Constitutional principle was preserved, but continental leverage weakened, regional cohesion frayed, and the affected states moved farther from the institutions meant to discipline them.
