A band of states from the Atlantic to the Red Sea has spent the past decade replacing elected governments with soldiers. The pattern is regional, and the causes travel.
Between the Sahara and the savannah runs a strip of countries that share a
climate, a set of trade routes and, increasingly, a form of government. Mali,
Burkina Faso and Niger are run by officers who took power by force. Chad's
transfer of authority after the death of its long-serving president followed the
form of a succession rather than an election. Sudan's army and its paramilitary
rival turned a promised civilian transition into a war between two commands.
The argument the soldiers make
In each case the justification offered was security. Civilian governments had
failed to stop armed groups operating across borders that exist on maps more
firmly than on the ground. The claim was not baseless: insurgencies rooted in
local grievances over land, cattle and water had spread faster than any of the
states could respond, and foreign counter-terrorism partnerships produced
patrols rather than governance.
What the coups have not produced is the security they promised. Control of the
capital is not control of the countryside, and a government whose legitimacy
rests on a security argument has to keep delivering security.
What the states have in common
Three structural features recur across the belt.
- Thin fiscal bases. Revenue comes from a small number of commodities and
from external partners. Neither source requires the state to bargain with its
own population, which weakens the habit of accountability in both directions.
- Young populations, slow economies. Median age across the belt is under
twenty. Formal employment absorbs a fraction of each cohort entering the
labour market.
- Borders that divide communities rather than states. Pastoralist routes,
language groups and trading families cross every line drawn in the colonial
period, which makes a purely national security policy structurally incomplete.
Why it matters beyond the region
The belt sits on the land routes north. Policy in Europe has for a decade
treated the Sahel primarily through the lens of migration and counter-terrorism,
which has tended to privilege whichever authority can offer cooperation on those
two files. That is a weak filter for distinguishing durable governments from
temporary ones.
Meanwhile the juntas have diversified their partnerships. The withdrawal of
French forces and the arrival of other security providers did not change the
underlying arithmetic: external troops can hold positions, but they cannot
collect taxes, run courts or settle disputes over grazing rights.
The question in the Sahel is not who holds the presidential palace. It is
whether any authority can make a claim on the countryside that the countryside
accepts.
Reading the region on the map
Switch the globe to the Encyclopedia view and compare this group against the
corruption and extreme-poverty layers. The belt does not stand out because its
states are uniquely badly run; it stands out because the gap between the
territory each state claims and the territory it administers is unusually wide.
