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Nina Wilén, "Securitizing the Sahel: Analyzing External Interventions and Their Consequences" (Oxford UP, 2025)
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Welcome to the New Books Network.
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D
Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased to welcome back onto the New Books Network podcast Dr. Nina Willand. Tell us about her her latest book titled Securitizing the Sahel, Analysing External Interventions and Their Consequences, published by Oxford University Press in 2025. In fact, in October 2025, both in paperback and in hardback at the same time, which is pretty unusual, but definitely makes this work more accessible, which is intriguing because we are going to be talking about a whole bunch of different external interventions in the Sahel, not just one, not just the American or the European. We're going to be doing some interesting comp comparison here to make sense of things that have been happening for a long time that are pretty complicated to look at individually. But there's been a lot of intensive research done by Nina in this book to make sense of all of this, which is really quite helpful. So, Nina, thank you so much for coming back onto the New Books Network to tell us about your latest project.
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E
Thank you so much, Miranda, for having me. I'm glad to be back.
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D
Could you please introduce yourself a bit for listeners who maybe haven't heard you here before and then tell us about this latest project and the questions you're asking in it.
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E
So I'm working as the Africa Director at think tank in Belgium that's called the Egmont Royal Institute for International Relations. It's an international think tank that's based in Brussels where we do research, as the name indicates, on different types of international relations. And I'm then the head of the Africa Program, where I'm focusing mostly on issues related to security, peace, building, conflict analysis, and of course, everything related to the military and defense issues. And I'm also associate professor at the Department of Political Science at Lund University in Sweden. So I have one foot in the academic world still. And then I have one foot in the think tank world, where I'm much more closely associated with policy briefs or policy advice and strategic writing for policymakers and diplomats, both Europeans and different nationalities. And yes, I've been writing this book for the last two and a half years, I think, but the research behind it has been approximately seven years that I've been doing research on security force assistance in the Sahel. And I decided that I wanted to write this book at the end of 2022, when I had already been doing research on the Sahel and in particular the different security interventions for about four years. And by then I had already written quite a few articles and quite a few policy briefs on different operations and case studies. And I'd been going to the region several times, a region which has been described as ghost like, as unintended, often as ungoverned, with vast spaces where the main resource is the road and where power is linked to mobility and the control of the circulation of people and goods, which, if anything, the last few months, and we're recording this in November, I should say there has been a fuel blockade by one of the jihadist groups in the region, in Mali, which is illustrating this importance of roads and mobility. And I wanted to write a book that was a bit more comprehensive than what I had written myself, and that I hadn't seen anybody else write either, something that could both take a macro perspective and analyze and compare several different external missions and at the same time provide a deeper understanding from a micro level about how they worked on the ground. Like, what does a security force assistance mission? What do the individuals in that mission do on an everyday basis? And I wanted to get an answer to an overarching question that I had of so what, what does it mean that we have so many different security interventions in this region? What, what effects do they produce? What influence do they have? And how do they restructure power relations on a national, regional and international level, both within the Sahel and beyond the Sahel? So these were the main motivations, I think, behind my writing of this book.
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D
That's a very helpful foundation for our discussion. Thank you for starting us off with that. And it is, in fact, that idea of the multiple missions that I want to go to next. Can you give us a sense of the different kinds of missions that we're talking about when we're discussing securitization in the Sahel?
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E
Right. So there are several different types of missions. There have been multilateral missions. So, of course, the UN peacekeeping operation MINUSMA, which was deployed since 2013 and was then expelled by the Mali and junta in 2023, MINUSMA was focused solely on Mali. You had three CSTP operation EU, CSTP operation in Mali in Niger. You had one military mission, the EUTM Mali in Mali, of course. And then you had two civilian CSTP operations, also eu, of course, in Mali and Niger, UCAP Sahel, Mali and UCAP Sahel, Niger. So those are the, let's say, I would say that these are the four multilateral operations that have been undertaken in the region. And then you have had quite a few bilateral, of course, the largest one is the French counterterrorism Operation Barcan, which was also deployed, was a follow up to the first counterterrorism operation by France launched in Mali in 2013, Operation Serval. And then it morphed into this Operation Barcan, which stayed from 2014 until 2022, when it was also withdrawing from the region under quite difficult circumstances and tensions with the Malian authorities. And you also had Task Force Tacuba, which was a smaller mission that was considered as a Europeanized mission, a special forces mission, which was composed of approximately 1000 troops by different European forces, but which was under the command of the French in the framework of Operation Barcan. So it was still a bilateral command and control, but with different troops from European states in it so that was also somewhat of a multilateral operation. And then you had different types of bilateral defense collaboration. You've had several different states, Belgium, Germany, Canada, the us, France, Italy being involved in a special forces train and equip 4th generation project in Niger from 2018 and forwards until the couple in 2023, more or less. And then of course different types of train and equip or defense collaboration with individual states. And since importantly, perhaps I'm not covering this that much in the book, but I do talk about the fact that since 2021, end of 2021, there have been Russian troops in Mali that have also provided security force assistance and combat assistance, firstly in the shape of the Wagner Group which were the Russian mercenaries and then they transform into the Afrika Korps and they are also present in Burkina Faso.
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D
That is a bunch of different missions. Thank you for laying that out for us. Can you tell us more about how you've gone about investigating all of this and some of the types of sources, for example, you've used in the research?
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E
So I think that I wanted to write this book because partly because of course I'm interested in the topic and because I think I've done enough research on it and partly because I think that I have quite a unique position. I started off this interview by saying that I have one foot in academia and one foot in somehow the policy world as a think tanker. And I think that that has given me access to different worlds and different perspectives. And I've also been working quite extensively in the past as a researcher at the military academy in Belgium. So I've also have had the possibility to join the Belgian Special Forces and be embedded with them in the field in Niger for several weeks at a time to observe as a participant observer of what they have been doing when they have been training the Nigerian troops to see their everyday work and their life and in that way getting this bottom up perspective of what do they actually do on the ground, like walking, living with them for several weeks. But I've also had the chance to go with French armed forces to their bases in the Sahel in 2021 in Mali, also visiting for example the Task Force Tacuba base in Menaka in Gao, of course the big base where both Baran and Minusma were located in Niger, in Yami where there was an air force base and in Chad in Jamena where the French also had base. So I've been able to go around to these different locations with the military. And that of course also gives you the Possibility to ask the questions and see what they're doing, observe things. And then I've been invited to join quite a few military delegations with higher officers, so generals that are going to the region as a civilian expert at several locations, which has given me more of a top down perspective, a military perspective. And then finally, I think as a think tanker and as an academic, I have been both organizing conferences with Belgian and European diplomats, other think tankers, other academics on the topic. So I've been learning from them. But I have myself, of course also been invited as an expert to participate in these conferences. And I've also been writing strategy for the National Security Strategy, for the Defense strategy and for the Sahel strategy, and pitching in with some sort of expertise to different ministries when needed. So I think that has also allowed me to see the foreign policymakers perspective on how do they deal with these issues, what are the different options that they are facing and how do they reflect on the short, medium and long term. So taken together, I think that all of these experiences have made it possible for me to see the situation from very different perspective, military, political, academic, diplomatic, and of course to learn from all of these individuals.
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D
Yeah, and I would add to that that it's also given you the perspective of both the short and long term, the kind of big picture and the picture immediately on the ground. So I wonder if we can kind of zoom out a bit and talk something about kind of the framing of really all of these missions, that they're all kind of trying to do different things when you get into the details. But they're all operating in this context of the Sahel being in crisis, being a place of crisis, and that being a really dominant discourse, which is when and why do we start to get that being the main narrative for the Sahel.
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E
So I'm going to go back a little bit to answer that question in time. And I think that we really need to go back to the early 2000s when there was a shift in the way that Western and multilateral institutions, Western actors and multilateral institutions understood security. From a previous approach of seeing interstate war, nuclear threats as the main threats to Western states, there was a shift and a tilt towards terrorism being the main threat. And with that, it was also the identification of weak and failing states as a threat. Something that we saw in both the US security strategy from 2002 and then repeated in the EU security strategy from 2003 and then from 2008 and onwards. France in particular pushed this narrative in different security documents, focusing on the arc of crisis in Africa, then from one side of the continent to the other, identifying the Sahel region as a problematic region. And France even developed its own Sahel Strategy already in 2008, which apparently was remarkably similar to the one that came from the UEU in 2011. So I think that in the 2000s, weak states, ungoverned spaces, were framed as a threat not just to the states themselves, but to peace and stability more globally. And in parallel to that discourse and that shift in approach, there were events on the ground in the Sahel which confirmed and reinforced that discourse. There were quite a few attacks and kidnapping incidents in the Sahara sahel ban from 2003 and onwards by jihadist groups involving European tourists. So then the problem became something that concerned not just the region, but also Europe. And then of course we had the collapse of Libya in 2011, which prompted this influx of both arms and return of two IRREG separatist fighters to Mali in 2012. And from that point onwards we have all of these events in Mali with a mutiny, the coup, the military coup, and then this unholy alliance of jihadist and separatist rebels which were advancing towards the capital and which pushed then the Sahel to the forefront of media of the UN's speeches, but also French presidents starting to push for some sort of intervention in the region and in Mali in particular, as he talked about it, as a terrorist threat, not just to Mali, but as a threat to peace and security globally. And I think that this is really where the crisis in the Sahel takes off as a as a topic to be talked about more globally outside of the region.
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D
Ordstrom yeah, I think that's a really key point here that it might have kind of started from one place, but then you get multiple different external actors all going, oh yeah, no, we're going to agree with that.
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E
Right?
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D
Is that the kind of why it wasn't just the French that decided to kind of go this way? Or are there other factors we need to understand of sort of. It's not just that they're even agreeing on this French framing, it's that they're then deciding to do something about it. Like from 2013 we're getting multiple interventions all at the same time.
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E
Right. So I've written in the book and also in articles earlier I've talked about this logic of their own that I think that many external actors had for intervening. And in the book I'm trying to trace what that logic was. So France of course had an interest in maintaining their position as the. As the external actor which was considered the expert of the region in multilateral institutions like the eu, always the pen holder for the states in the region, at the UN Security Council for the different missions. So France had an interest. And of course there was also the question of terrorism, which was starting to become more and more problematic with the. With the French tourists and German tourists that were kidnapped. But I think there was also not just France, but there was also a will from the EU to project itself as a global security actor. Up until then, the EU had done a few CCP operations, but they had done them mainly in the drc. There hadn't been anything also in Somalia, of course, but I think the EU really had a moment where they wanted to project themselves as a security actor and they wanted to also try to implement all of their different tools in one area to. I'm not saying it was a test case, but they wanted to see the diplomatic, the political, the military and the development tools applied to one area to actually show the whole range of different foreign policy tools that the EU had. So there was an interest for sure from the EU as well, to intervene. And then you had the UN mission. Should be said that France was pushing quite heavily both within the EU for the CSTP operation EUTM Mali, but also for the establishment of the UN peacekeeping operation minusma, because France was a pen holder and they also saw MINUSMA as an exit strategy for themselves once they wanted to withdraw the counterterrorism operation, which didn't work. But there was this push. And for many of the European states, I think MINUSMA became a very symbolic return to UN peacekeeping in a period where there hadn't been many troop contributions from European states to any UN peace operation. And all of a sudden we had, at one point, I think there were 26 European states that were contributing troops to MINUSMA. Not always big numbers, not always substantial time. But the fact that there were so many European states contributing to UN peacekeeping operations, that was quite new at the time. And I think that it also, that also arranged quite a lot of European states, especially the ones who wanted to be voted in to the UN Security Council, non elected members. So the 10 elected members, because then it was very convenient for Germany, Sweden and Belgium, for example, to contribute troops to MINUSMA just before the election because that showed that they were investing in multilateralism, that they were investing in peacekeeping and in the UN in particular. So I think that taken together, all of these external actors also had an interest in framing the Sahel as a security risk and they had an interest in intervening, not necessarily always related to reality on the ground, but to their logic of their own.
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D
Okay, that's definitely helpful to understand and makes a lot of sense as to why there would be so much involvement. Of course, it's never going to be just one reason that explains it. So thank you for helping us understand those incentives. When we're talking though, about the multiple missions, it's probably worth clarifying, like are they literally in exactly the same place? Like the Sahel is pretty big, but still, how do they manage to kind of coexist in the same sort of area when there's so many different missions going on?
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E
I found that very interesting. I'm sure that those who are listening to this podcast might have read quite a few articles on the Sahel. And one of the article that has been the most cited is in a brilliant article by Signe called Ramnikilde, which is called a security traffic jam in the Sahel. I think where she. And now I'm trying to remember her co author, but I will find it in a second. But the whole point of that when I saying that there are so many missions, how do they actually manage to coexist in, in, in that area and are they not blocking each other? Like isn't there too many at the same time? And I think there's definitely a risk of that. And, and I think it depends the way how you view this, from which perspective that you see all of these missions from. From a local perspective, which I can't really adopt as I'm not from the region, I can imagine that there is a feeling of a lot of different external interventions from the external perspective, from the different missions that were there. Now I'm talking then about Mali, where you had Minismas, which had like about 13,000 troops at its most. Bar Khan Operation Barkan, the counterterrorism operation with about 5,000 troops. And. And then you had G5 Sahel, which was this regional ad hoc coalition, about 5,000 troops with troops from neighboring countries, including the Malians. And then you had these smaller CSTP operations, the EU ones, which had. At one point there was up to thousand troops in the utm, but that was quite, that was only for, for a limited period of time, but a few hundred troops. But that means that there were quite a lot of different troops with different nationalities in the country at the same time. And in the book I'm trying to understand how did they coexist, how did they coordinate or how did they collaborate informally? Because of course there was mandated collaboration. There were structured meetings between EUTM Mali, between Vinusma and between Bar Khan. But I wanted to see what's happening behind the scenes. So I did probably around 100 interviews altogether, not only from these missions, but, but many of the officers and soldiers that I spoke to came from these missions. And what I found was that there was really some sort of an informal ad hoc cooperation due to social networks, a lack of resources and very difficult, sometimes unfeasible mandates. So, meaning that often soldiers and officers found ways to bypass rules and regulations to achieve their own mandates or assist other missions trying to implement theirs. If you let me, I'll just give you a quote that I think illustrates this very well. One officer from EUTM said, it's nowhere in the mandate how you do it. For us, it was in the mandate to do it. But how that was our problem. But we simply didn't have the means to be self sufficient or autonomous. Sometimes it was purely thanks to the good relationship between officers. One phone call to the chief of staff of hey, can you take care of transporting us to the compound? End of citation. So I think that quote illustrates that it was really personal relations, often between the different officers and soldiers that made collaboration possible. And I found really that it was the social networks were very much based on similarities. So similarities in terms of occupation, they were all militaries. Similarities in terms of gender Almost all of them were mental similarities such as nationality and language were very important in what type of social network that developed. So the French were obviously overrepresented in all three missions. Barcan was a French mission Task force. Tacuba, when it was deployed, had more than half of its personnel which were French, even though it was a European mission. EUTM, at the start of EUTM, 50% of the staff was French. And in Minusma, the chief of staff is always French. And also some of the. Some of the key roles in Minusma were also French. So you had an over representation. And that also worked as some sort of informal liaison officers between the missions. And then, of course, French as a language was a unifying factor, I think, between the missions, because it was not only the French that spoke French, it was also the Belgians. And Belgium at one point in time were also heavily represented in all three of the missions, not Barkanden, but at one point they had three force commanders in a row for EUT and Mali at the same time as they had the force commander for Minisma, which meant that they had, of course, they came from the same military. So they could also have these informal discussions, informal relations. And I think one of the things that I found really interesting is how, for example, access to the medical facilities. So Bar Khan had one Role two hospital in Gao, a town in Mali, and so did Minisma. They also had a Role two hospital. So a Role two hospital is a hospital that can actually do advanced surgery, that often has dental care. It is really a hospital where you can do a lot of advanced types of interventions. And both Mnisma and Barkan had their hospital in the same camp. But all of the European contingents wanted to be treated at the Barcan hospital instead of the Minusma because the UN mission had lower standards according to these officers. And that access to the Barcan hospital was always informal or often informal, that there was somebody who knew someone, and then they could ask, hey, can I go to the dentist in the Barcan hospital? Or can I have surgery in this hospital rather than the other? So you could see that there were these informal networks that developed based on. Often about. Around similarities of language and nationality.
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D
Yeah, that's really interesting to unpack because of course, that's not necessarily the sort of thing that would show up in, like, official. What is the mission paperwork.
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E
Right.
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D
And yet by doing this kind of investigation, you can map out all of these sorts of connections. Was it all sort of collaboration, though? Like, were there moments of tension or the overlap? Kind of doesn't get successfully managed.
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E
I think that there were definitely moment of tensions as well. They had a sort of a formal task division. Right. So there was. Barcan was supposed to fight the terrorists and train the Malian and the Sahelian security forces and UTM was supposed to train the Malian armed forces and Minisma was supposed to implement the peace accord and protect civilians. I'm, I'm simplifying this, but these were their main tasks. And then they all had the overarching objective of stabilizing the Sahel and in this case stabilizing Mali. And I think that one of the officers I interviewed, he said we were like the five fingers of a hand, we were complementary. And when he say five, then he's also of course including not just Bar Khan, EUTM, Minusma, he's also including the Fama, the Malian Armed Forces and G5 Sahel, this regional ad hoc coalition. That's a very harmonious way of seeing their coexistence. I've also heard from some officers that it wasn't that easy and that sometimes there were friction with regard to intelligence sharing, for example, because EUTM basically did not have any intelligence at all, whereas Barkan had quite a lot because they were one a bilateral operation. And then the UN actually had one of the most developed intelligence capacities that a UN peacekeeping mission can have. But of course, in comparison to Barkan, it's not really comparable. So there was some sort of tension about sharing intelligence between the mission where the other two mission, YITM and Minisma, they were wanted to have more intelligence for Barkan. Barcan was not as willing to give it to these missions as others because they were afraid that it would then leak out to others. There was also within Minasma, there were also quite some tensions between the European troops and the African troops. Many have already described MinusMA as a two tier mission where you have the African troops fighting, being out in the field and the European troops bringing the technology and being more for the intel gathering. And there were also tensions, as the Europeans, they were termed by, by the people working in the mission, the skiing nations, that they did not want to share intelligence with their African counterparts even though they were in the same mission because they did not trust them. So there were definitely tensions both between the missions and within the missions at different locations.
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- [34:16]
D
Yeah, that's helpful to understand. And it is actually kind of those sort of further out circles from the missions. I'd like to talk about further as well. Right. Because there are some hints there in terms of how the militaries cooperate kind of around and outside of the missions. What therefore are the wider impacts of the individual missions, but also of the kind of fact of this overlap if we're looking at the military implications or even the political or social impacts.
- [34:44]
E
Right. So coming back then to the book, how I try to frame that, I think maybe I didn't say this in the beginning, but that's important part of the book because it's really the rationale of the book was that I wanted to ask three questions and I wanted to answer those three questions. They were why did the Sahel become this region for external security interventions? And I think I already answered that question question in your previous previously during the podcast. And then the how, and that's a bit where we are right now, how did these different missions develop, coexist, coordinate and cooperate on the ground? And the last question that I asked in the book was so what? So what? What does it mean in terms of, of consequences for the region and for the wider region and the national states themselves? And I think that I tried to divide the consequences into Three different themes. One is civil military relations. One is how the security forces were or were not improved through these different missions that tried to improve them. And then the third. So what answer is really on a broader level, on a macro level, like on a, On a global level, how we can see the global power competition playing out in the Sahel over the years since 2020, 2021, when Russia came in and coup leaders kicked out the Western and the multilateral institutions. But I think I'll start by answering your question, looking at the civil military imbalance that was produced through these missions in the region. And I think it's important here to remember that the Sahel region was already before there were external security interventions, was already before that heavily tilted towards a civil military imbalance. The region had seen a lot of military coups already before. So when there was a new coup wave that started in 2020 with a coup in Mali, that was Mali's fourth coup. And then we have a fifth coup a year later. In Burkina Faso there had been nine coups, and in Niger there were fifth. The fifth coup took place in 2023. So you already had a very strong imbalance between the military and the civilians. But of course, if you send in militaries and security forces to improve the local security forces, then you're also increasing that imbalance. You're also tilting that balance further towards the military. And if you frame the crisis, which has been done by external actors, but also by the national actors, as a security crisis, you also frame the solution in terms of security actors. So you increase the status of the military by framing the crisis as only security crisis. And that means that they are the ones who are supposed to solve it. And that also means that they get higher or their increased budgets. I'm including tables and graphs about how the budget expenditures for the military in the Sahel countries, they increased exponentially during the years that the foreign interventions were there, of course, as a reaction to the threat to the different threats, the jihadist threats and the different armed non state actors, but also because they were seen as the solution to the different crisis. And I think that that really tilted the balance. I'm not establishing a causal relation, a cause and effect relation between the military coups and the security force assistance missions by the external actors. But I think that there is a correlation. So that's one of the answers to your question about, so what were the consequences?
- [39:10]
D
Yeah, that's definitely helpful to understand. Is another consequence the number of coups in the region, because it seems to be at the Same time as these overlapping missions. Is that related?
- [39:23]
E
I think that there is a learning curve between the different coup leaders. Each coup has its own reasons, its own rationale. But if you're a frustrated military who has been suffering quite a lot of casualties, you're fighting a war that has is taking ages and you're not really advancing, things are deteriorating. You find that your political leaders are corrupt and not really understanding what you're going through. And you look to your neighbor and you see that there is a military leader who managed to overthrow the civilian government and take power, then there is a chance that you will look into possibilities to do the same. Right. Because there is this sort of. If you're going to calculate the probability. If at one point I calculated the number of coup attempts and the number of successful coups since 2020 in Africa more broadly, and there was a 70% chance of a coup attempt actually succeeding, and then it went down because then there were more coup attempts. But if you say that there is more than a 50% chance that you will succeed in launching a coup, then the temptation becomes bigger. And if you also know that you are going to get support from your neighboring military coup leader, then that temptation grows disproportionately, I think. And we've seen now that in Mali, in Niger and in Burkina Faso, the three coup leaders who took power between 2020 and 2022, they have formed their own alliance of Sahelian states, and now they call it the confederation. So they're definitely supporting each other. And I think that's one of the. One of the things that have really been drawn from this coup wave, that they are looking to a neighbor, they're seeing that it works. And then they're also thinking, if they can do it, then I can do it. And we should not forget that in Burkina Faso, there was no military. There was only one small special forces operation, about 200 French troops that had been there for a decade. So not that many foreign troops when the coups took place in Burkina. So not. Not the same type of context as in Mali.
- [41:58]
D
For example, besides the impact on coups and decision making, there are there any other ways that this has. All, all of these missions has impacted kind of security forces within the Sahel or other strategic decision making around politics there.
- [42:13]
E
They have definitely impacted the structure of the security sectors in the region. There was a very strong interest, especially from the eu, but also from other external actors in establishing a stronger border control, border securitization, if you want both, because they did not want migration flows up north towards Europe. But also because many of the threats that the Sahel region is facing are borderless threats. So we've seen that the jihadists are going across the borders, which makes it more difficult for the different security forces to collaborate and fight them effectively. There's also organized crime, there is trafficking, there's different type of borderless threats. Which means that there was a strong focus from all of the Western interventions to increase the border control. And to do that there was the creation of these mobile border control companies in different types of security forces. So for example, in Niger, the EU were training and setting up mobile border control companies within the police force that were quite robustly equipped, like, equipped more like a military than like police forces, because they were sent to the borders to control and secure the borders. But when the other forces, the other security corps within Niger saw that these police border companies, they got new equipment, often better training, and they were considered as a more of an elite first, then they wanted their own mobile border company. So all of a sudden you also had the same in the Shandarme, which Niger has, like another type of mobile border company. And then the, the National Guard wanted to have the same. So all of a sudden you had this duplication, let's say, or the creation of, of the same type of force to control or secure borders. Or let's say the what, what was termed the ungoverned spaces or the borderlands, but from three different forces, from the National Guard, from the Shandam and from the police. And that of course could create some confusion about task division, who is doing what. On paper there was a quite clear division, that the police is more in the urban areas, that the Shandam is, is, is going towards the institution and guarding the institutions and so on, and that the National Guard is going further out. But in reality there was a confusion with regards to who were doing what. And the people that I interviewed in the different forces found that it increase the tensions, there was rivalry between them. So I think that this is one of many consequences for the local security forces of these, that there is this creation of not necessarily elite units, but they're considered as more elite because they have better equipment and better training than the others in many of the different forces. And that that sometimes both creates a more competent unit, but also it creates more tensions and rivalry between them.
- [45:56]
D
Yeah, I can definitely see how that would cause resentment. Are there any other implications of all of this, maybe beyond the security forces that you've come up with in the book that you want to close our discussion With.
- [46:09]
E
Well, I think it would be an error not to discuss the strategic realignment that we've seen in the region since 2021, 2022, when the three states, Mali, Burkina Faso and Chad and Niger decided four states that they were going to expel the Western forces and the multilateral operations and change security partners to Russia. So what we've seen in Mali, Mali being the first state after the second coup in May 2021, nine months later, they decided that they did not want to have the French counterterrorism Operation Barkan there anymore, basically making it very difficult for Barcan to stay, as well as Task Force Takuba. And very shortly after, it was clear that there were Wagner troops, Russian Wagner troops in the country. And the same happened in Burkina Faso in 2022, after the second coup in September. In 2022, in Burkina Faso, it took only four months before they decided to end the security collaboration, the defense accord, with the French, who had been in the country with this special forces operation for about 10 years before. And then in 2024, there were Russian troops arriving in Burkina Faso as well. And the president, Captain Traore, has repeatedly talked about Russia as a strategic partner and kept a very anti, Western, anti French discourse, just as his Malian counterpart, Colonel who is now General Goita. And in Niger in 2023, after the coup in July, it took only 10 days before they expelled the French troops and later also the two EU CCP operations which were on the ground one since 2012. So you can really see that there has been a strategic realignment in all of the three states. And Chad, to a lesser extent, which have hosted French troops for decades, also made a change, but a very different one in 2020, at the end of 2024, where they also ended the security collaboration with France, but through in different way than the other Sahelian states, in a less, less brutal way, let's say. And they've been way more discreet regarding their new security partners. But what we do see, and I think that's maybe important to end with, is that this strategic realignment takes place place in the midst of a global power competition where we have really Western states, we have Russia who is involved in a war against Ukraine. And then this has consequences beyond the Sahelian region, because you can see that the global power competition has moved to Africa as well, and that Russia is trying to increase its presence in different areas. And I think the Sahel region has become really a flagship for Russia in that regard. Now, three, four years later, after they arrived in the region, you can see that they're starting to have a hard time. There have been quite a few setbacks. They're not as efficient working together with the Malians against the jihadists. There has been a huge increase of jihadist groups. They're expanding their territorial control. And we started this mission by talking about the fuel blockade that the jihadists have implemented in Mali since September, putting enormous pressure on Bamako, the capital of Mali. And we can see that the Russians are not capable of assisting the Malian or the Sahelian security forces. So I think it's a question of time before Russia is going to be forced to leave. But it might be longer than what Western or multilateral actors would like to. But that means that Sahel remains in the spotlight and it remains a question about security in the Sahel. And I think that's where we started this mission.
- [50:31]
D
Yeah. And so I guess we'll have to pay attention to what comes next. What are you going to be working on now that this book is done? Obviously, as you mentioned, you've got sort of a foot in the academic world and in the more policy think tank area. Anything currently on your desk you want to give us a sneak peek preview of?
- [50:47]
E
Right. So I'm continuing to work on the security collaborations, the defense collaborations and or defense sector. And I think together with one of my colleague colleagues, Sophie Rose, we're now looking into sort of a prospective study of what's going to happen once there is an accord or ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia, because we are going to look into the number of soldiers that will be demobilized. And we've seen that from previous experience that once there is a huge number of soldiers that needs to be demobilized after a big armed conflict or a war, there is also the risk of the creation of new mercenaries, new private military companies. And that risk, I think is very big, that there will be new Russian mercenary groups deployed to Africa in the coming years. We're talking about hundreds and thousands of soldiers that will be demobilized at some point in time. And there is a big risk that that will have a very detrimental effect on Africa's security.
- [52:01]
D
Well, for anyone wanting to learn more about all of this, they can of course, read the book we've been discussing titled Securitizing the Sahel Analyzing External Interventions and Their Consequen, published in both paperback and hardback by Oxford University Press in 2025. Nina, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast. Thank you so much for having me, Miranda.