The Unfinished State: Why the Sahel’s Crisis Runs Deeper Than Terrorism. (1- 2)

By: abdo Alnasser Solum Hamed

For more than a decade, Africa’s Sahel has been portrayed as one of the world’s most dangerous fronts in the fight against terrorism. Armed groups expand, and armies respond. Territory is lost, and military operations are launched to reclaim it. Governments fall, coups reshape political orders, foreign forces withdraw, and new security partnerships emerge. Yet after years of military campaigns, international intervention, and rising security expenditure, the crisis has not disappeared. It has evolved, shifted geographically, and grown more complex.

That persistence raises a more fundamental question: why have the states of the Sahel, despite repeated changes in governments, strategies, and foreign partners, been unable to break the cycle?

Perhaps because the crisis has been framed too narrowly. The problem lies not only in the strength of armed groups, but in the political, institutional, and economic conditions that allow them to expand. It is not simply a question of troop numbers or weapons systems, but of whether the state can make itself meaningfully present beyond the capital—in villages and borderlands, in schools and courts, in markets and local economies.

Seen from this perspective, the Sahel is confronting more than a terrorist insurgency. It is facing a crisis of state-building: a struggle over the distribution of power and wealth, the relationship between political centers and peripheral communities, and ultimately the meaning of sovereignty and legitimacy.

Mali illustrates the problem. Its crisis did not begin with the rise of jihadist organizations. Longstanding tensions in the north and a difficult relationship between the central government and peripheral communities predated the current insurgency. The collapse of Libya’s political order in 2011 then sent weapons and fighters across a vast desert space, allowing older local rebellions to intersect with more organized transnational jihadist networks. Niger and Burkina Faso followed different trajectories, but eventually confronted a similar dilemma: states attempting to secure vast territories with limited resources against armed movements capable of exploiting porous borders, local grievances, and uneven government presence.

This reveals one of the central paradoxes of the Sahel: the state is not entirely absent; it is unevenly present. Governments can sign international agreements, command armies, negotiate mining contracts, collect revenue, and exercise authority in major urban centers, yet struggle to provide the same degree of justice, education, healthcare, infrastructure, and administration in remote areas. The problem, therefore, is not simply a lack of state capacity. It is the unequal distribution of that capacity across territory and across functions.

That inequality is political as much as administrative. A citizen in the capital and another in a remote border region may carry the same passport but experience very different versions of the state. One encounters it through universities, hospitals, courts, public administration, roads, and infrastructure. The other may encounter it primarily through a checkpoint, a military patrol, or an official whose presence is intermittent.

Geography then becomes an inequality of citizenship. Some of the most consequential borders in the Sahel are therefore not the international frontiers separating one country from another, but the invisible boundaries separating the political center from the social periphery.

It is within this distance that armed groups find room to establish themselves. Yet they do not enter a genuine vacuum, because authority rarely disappears; it is redistributed. Traditional leaders, community networks, influential traders, smugglers, militias, and armed organizations may all exercise different forms of power. When an armed group begins collecting levies, protecting routes, arbitrating disputes, or regulating access to land and resources, it is doing more than employing violence. It is competing with the state over the functions of government.

The conflict therefore becomes a struggle not merely for territory, but for authority. Who makes the rules? Who collects revenue? Who protects commerce? Who resolves disputes? Who determines access to roads, grazing land, or markets? And whose decisions are ultimately obeyed?

When the answers are divided between the state and armed actors, sovereignty has already begun to fragment, even if the country’s borders remain unchanged.

This helps explain why military operations alone have repeatedly proved insufficient. Armies can kill fighters, destroy bases, and retake territory, but they cannot rebuild political trust through force alone. If the conditions that enable recruitment remain intact, battlefield victories may prove temporary.

Those conditions cannot be reduced to poverty. Poverty does not mechanically produce extremism. The danger grows when economic deprivation intersects with weak justice, disputes over land and resources, unemployment, marginalization, abuses, and the search for protection, revenge, income, or social status.

Armed groups often do not need to invent these grievances. They need only identify them, weaponize them, and place them within a larger narrative. A dispute over land or grazing rights can be transformed into a conflict over identity. A local injustice can become an entry point for recruitment. A community that distrusts official institutions may turn to alternative sources of protection.

In this sense, insurgent organizations can take an existing grievance and give it three things: a weapon, a story, and an enemy.

Countering extremism is therefore not only a battle of arms or ideology. It is also a contest over justice and governance. A state that cannot persuade citizens to trust its courts more than armed intermediaries faces a problem that additional troops alone cannot solve. The most consequential loss may not be a village or a road, but the state’s claim to be the most credible source of rules, protection, and dispute resolution.

The roots of this problem are partly historical. The states of the Sahel emerged from colonial rule with vast territories, unevenly integrated populations, and economies heavily oriented toward the production and export of primary commodities. Independence transferred legal and political sovereignty to national governments, but building effective economic, administrative, and social sovereignty was a far longer process.

This does not absolve post-independence elites of responsibility. Decades of corruption, poor governance, unequal development, and policy failure cannot simply be attributed to colonialism. But ignoring the structures inherited at independence is no more convincing than blaming the past for every contemporary failure. The deeper problem is that political independence advanced more rapidly than the institutional and economic capacity required to make sovereignty equally meaningful across national territory.

That gap is particularly visible in the economy. The Sahel is not poor in natural resources. Mali and Burkina Faso possess substantial gold resources; Niger has long been associated with uranium; and the wider region has significant livestock, agricultural, and solar-energy potential. Yet possessing natural wealth is not the same as possessing the economic power that can be built from it.

Raw gold is not a gold industry. Uranium deposits do not by themselves create industrial power. Abundant sunlight does not automatically create a solar manufacturing base.

The more important question is where Sahelian states sit within the value chain. Who provides the financing and technology? Who conducts extraction and processing? Who controls transportation, insurance, refining, and marketing? Where are skilled jobs created? And where does the largest share of value ultimately accumulate?

A country can therefore be rich in geological resources while remaining economically weak. If it exports raw materials while importing higher-value goods, technology, and expertise, resource ownership alone will not generate strategic autonomy. The challenge is not merely to exercise sovereignty over the resource, but to acquire greater sovereignty over the chain of value surrounding it.

This distinction leads to a broader one between independence and sovereignty. Independence is a legal and political status. Sovereignty is an accumulated capacity. A state may have been independent for decades while remaining dependent on external actors for military equipment, financing, technology, food, or the exploitation of strategic resources. Such dependence does not mean that colonial rule continues unchanged, but it can constrain the range of choices available to national governments.

The sovereignty agenda that has gained political force in Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso therefore faces a more demanding test than the withdrawal of foreign troops or the renegotiation of old agreements. The critical question is not simply whether French and Western influence has declined, or whether relations with Russia, China, Türkiye, and other partners have expanded. It is whether the underlying structure of dependence has changed.

If excessive reliance on one external partner is merely replaced by excessive reliance on another, foreign policy may change direction without producing a comparable increase in national capacity. Sovereignty in an interconnected world does not mean isolation. It means having alternatives. A government able to diversify its sources of financing, technology, security cooperation, and access to markets possesses greater negotiating room. A government dependent on a single indispensable partner has far less.

The deeper measure of sovereignty, then, is not whether a state can say “no” to its former partner, but whether it can avoid being compelled to say “yes” to its new one.

This is why development cannot be separated from national security. A factory, a university, a power grid, a road, or a communications network may appear to belong to the civilian economy, but each can strengthen the foundations of sovereignty. Industry creates domestic value and employment. Universities reduce dependence on imported expertise. Roads connect peripheral regions to national markets. Reliable electricity makes industrialization possible. A broader productive economy expands the tax base, giving the state greater capacity to finance security and public institutions from domestic resources.

Prolonged conflict, however, pushes in the opposite direction. As insecurity grows, military expenditure rises. As security absorbs more of the budget, fewer resources remain for education, healthcare, infrastructure, and productive investment. Weak development then sustains unemployment, marginalization, and poor public services—conditions that armed organizations can exploit.

Governments respond with still more security spending, creating a dangerous cycle: insecurity produces a more security-centered state, while a state that becomes excessively security-centered at the expense of its civilian functions may fail to address the conditions that allow insecurity to persist.

Conflict also creates an economy of its own. Smuggling, informal gold extraction, fuel trafficking, arms networks, protection payments, and control over commercial routes can become sources of income and political power. Disorder is therefore not equally costly to everyone. Some actors develop material interests in its continuation.

Once that happens, peace is no longer simply the absence of gunfire. It becomes a redistribution of income, authority, and opportunity.

Closing a smuggling route will achieve little if border communities have no viable legal alternative. Disarming a fighter may not be sustainable if weapons provide his income and status. Removing one armed organization may bring only temporary relief if the wider war economy remains capable of financing another. A durable peace therefore requires making stability economically more valuable than disorder and the legal economy more attractive than the illicit one.

For the landlocked states of the Sahel, geography makes this challenge even more consequential. Their economies depend on corridors leading to ports beyond their borders. A road is therefore more than infrastructure: it is an artery of sovereignty. An armed organization does not need to capture a capital to weaken a government. Disrupting fuel supplies, commercial transport, or access to major routes can raise prices, undermine trade, and make state weakness visible in the daily lives of citizens.

In such a conflict, trucks, roads, markets, and supply chains become strategic assets alongside military bases.

Logistics becomes politics, and infrastructure becomes sovereignty.