Ethiopia War of Attrition (2)

By: Dr. Abdo Alnasser Solum Hamed

The cross-border nature of the crisis means that no Sahelian state can resolve it entirely on its own. Armed orga nizations, trafficking networks, commercial routes, pastoral communities, and illicit economies all operate across frontiers, while states still tend to respond through nationally bounded institutions. A transnational crisis confronted primarily through national frameworks inevitably creates gaps that armed actors can exploit.

The growing alignment among Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso must therefore be judged by a standard broader than military cooperation. Its historical significance will depend on whether these states can move from a military geography to an economic geography: linking electricity networks, transport corridors, communications, agricultural markets, industries, and trade routes while securing reliable access to ports and external markets.

For landlocked countries, sovereignty is not merely control over national territory. It is also the ability to reach the outside world through multiple and reliable routes. A country with few logistical alternatives remains vulnerable to external pressure regardless of the strength of its political rhetoric. Regional integration, therefore, is not simply an economic ambition for the Sahel. It is part of the architecture of strategic autonomy.

The military coups that have reshaped Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger must also be understood within this broader crisis of legitimacy. They were not simply conventional struggles for power. They emerged amid mounting frustration with governments that had failed to reverse deteriorating security despite years of international military cooperation. In that environment, promises of decisive action, restored sovereignty, and national dignity gained considerable political appeal.

This gave rise to a different source of political legitimacy: performance. When elected governments fail to provide security or demonstrate effective authority across national territory, some citizens may begin to question whether electoral legitimacy alone is enough. Yet legitimacy based on performance carries its own demanding test: sooner or later, it must deliver results.

Governments cannot indefinitely explain failure by pointing to previous administrations, former colonial powers, or foreign interference. Eventually, the questions become unavoidable: Has security improved? Has the economy grown stronger? Has the state restored an effective presence in marginalized regions? Has dependence on external actors declined? Most importantly, has everyday life improved?

Taking control of government is considerably easier than rebuilding the state. An army can seize the political center, but military command alone cannot create an effective judiciary, a productive economy, a functioning education system, or a professional administration capable of reaching distant communities. If new political legitimacy is not translated into institutional capacity, the weaknesses that undermined the previous order can reappear under different leadership.

A coup can change who governs without changing how power works. Political elites may be replaced while deeper patterns of revenue distribution, center-periphery relations, institutional weakness, and economic dependence remain largely intact. Genuine political transformation must therefore be measured not by the rhetoric of new leaders, but by whether the mechanisms through which the state exercises authority, distributes resources, and creates opportunity actually change.

Demography adds another layer of pressure. The Sahel has one of the world’s youngest and fastest-growing populations. This could become one of the region’s greatest strategic assets if education, skills, investment, and employment expand alongside it. But it can also become a source of enormous pressure when the number of young people entering the labor market grows faster than the economy’s ability to absorb them.

This does not mean that unemployed young people automatically become fighters. Rather, when the formal economy cannot offer credible routes to income and social mobility, alternative pathways expand. Migration becomes one option. Informal commerce and smuggling become others. In some areas, armed networks may also offer income, protection, identity, or social status.

The competition between the state and armed groups is therefore also a competition over the future. Which can offer a young person the more convincing path forward: a state promising education and employment over time, or a network offering money, protection, and status today?

Seen from this perspective, job creation is not merely social policy; it is part of national security. Education, likewise, is not simply a public service but an investment in long-term stability.

Climate change further intensifies these pressures. Shifting rainfall patterns, rising temperatures, water scarcity, and mounting pressure on grazing land can sharpen competition among communities whose livelihoods depend heavily on agriculture and pastoralism. But climate change does not directly create terrorism or war. Drought does not carry a weapon. The decisive question is how institutions manage scarcity.

Where institutions are capable and trusted, disputes over water, land, and grazing can be mediated through law and public policy. Where institutions are weak, the same disputes can escalate into cycles of retaliation, opening space for armed actors to intervene and absorb local grievances into wider conflicts. Climate change in the Sahel is therefore better understood as a risk multiplier: it intensifies political, social, and institutional weaknesses that already exist.

These dynamics ultimately converge on one fundamental concept: the social contract. Why does a citizen accept the authority of the state? Not simply because the state commands an army, but because it offers something in return: security, justice, public services, and a reasonable opportunity to build a future.

When that exchange breaks down, the state does not disappear overnight. Ministries remain, flags continue to fly, and armies continue to operate. But something deeper begins to erode: the belief that the state is the most legitimate and effective framework for organizing collective life.

Trust, in this sense, is not an abstract moral value. It is a strategic resource. No government can place a soldier beside every home, market, school, well, and road. States depend on citizens respecting laws even when coercive power is not physically present. The less trust a state commands, the more costly governance becomes. More coercion is then required to secure compliance, and if coercion becomes a substitute for legitimacy rather than a means of protecting it, the distance between state and society can widen further.

This is why the Sahel crisis has no convincing explanation built around a single culprit. Colonial rule left borders, economic structures, and institutional legacies whose effects did not vanish with independence. But national elites have governed for decades and bear responsibility for corruption, policy failures, unequal development, and weak institutions. External powers have pursued their own strategic and economic interests, but local governments have also negotiated, accepted, and shaped many of those relationships. Armed groups have dramatically deepened the crisis, but they did not create every grievance they exploit. Climate change increases pressure on societies, but it does not transform scarcity into war on its own.

The crisis is better understood as a system in which multiple weaknesses reinforce one another. Weak institutions create space for armed actors. Armed violence forces governments to divert more resources toward security. Higher security spending can constrain investment in development. Weak development limits employment and public revenue. A narrow tax base reduces the resources available to extend services and administration into peripheral regions. Limited state presence creates new opportunities for illicit economies and armed governance. The cycle then begins again.

This matters because single-cause explanations tend to produce single-track solutions. If terrorism alone is identified as the problem, the answer becomes more military force. If foreign influence alone is blamed, the answer becomes replacing one external partnership with another. If control of natural resources is treated as the central issue, nationalization can appear to be the solution. If elections alone are treated as the source of legitimacy, holding a vote can become synonymous with political stability.

The experience of the Sahel suggests that none of these measures is sufficient on its own.

Elections cannot indefinitely compensate for a state unable to protect or serve its citizens. A coup cannot repair institutions merely by changing the leadership. The departure of a foreign military presence does not automatically create domestic security capacity. Greater control over natural resources does not guarantee prosperity if the economy remains unable to process them, finance production, develop technology, or retain more of their value. Military victories cannot produce lasting stability if civilian administration fails to follow soldiers into recovered territory.

A more durable strategy therefore requires the state to return not only as an army, but as an institution.

When territory is recovered, the judge must follow the soldier. So must the teacher, the doctor, the administrator, the engineer, the bank, and the investor. Otherwise, military control risks becoming a temporary hold over territory rather than the restoration of legitimate government.

The same principle applies to natural resources. Greater national control over gold, uranium, and other strategic assets may be important, but control should be the beginning of an economic strategy rather than its endpoint. The larger challenge is to turn resource wealth into productive capacity through processing, manufacturing, technical expertise, infrastructure, domestic supply chains, and employment.

A mine can generate revenue. An economy built around what comes before and after the mine can generate power.

That distinction is central to the future of sovereignty in the Sahel. States that finance a greater share of their own budgets, produce more of what their populations consume, train more of their own specialists, and diversify their economic relationships gain greater room for political choice. Sovereignty then ceases to be primarily the language of rejection and becomes the capacity to choose.

The same transformation is needed at the borders. For decades, many frontier regions have been viewed mainly through the lens of insecurity, smuggling, migration, and insurgency. Yet borders can also become spaces of production and legal exchange. A road used by smugglers today can carry legitimate commerce tomorrow. A frontier community treated primarily as a security problem can become a hub linking regional markets.

That requires a broader conception of regional integration. Security cooperation remains essential, but the Sahel cannot militarize its way into integration. Its states need regional public goods: transport corridors, interconnected power grids, water-management systems, communications infrastructure, trade facilitation, and institutions capable of addressing shared economic and environmental challenges.

The future of the Sahel will not be determined within the Sahel alone. Its landlocked states require strong connections with coastal West Africa, North Africa, and wider international markets. Access to ports, energy networks, investment, and trade routes will shape their strategic options just as much as military partnerships. Geography can remain a source of vulnerability, or infrastructure can transform it into strategic leverage.

The competition among external powers should also be understood through this lens. France, Russia, China, Türkiye, Gulf states, and other actors will continue to pursue their own interests. That is part of the normal logic of international politics. The central question is whether Sahelian governments can use that competition to widen their room for maneuver, or whether their countries will simply become arenas in which outside powers compete for influence, resources, and strategic position.

A state with stronger institutions and a more diversified economy can bargain with external powers. A weak state is more likely to be bargained over by them.

That distinction may ultimately determine whether the current language of sovereignty produces genuine strategic autonomy or merely a new configuration of dependence.

The future of the region will therefore be shaped less by slogans than by measurable changes. Are peripheral communities becoming more connected to state institutions? Is a larger share of the value generated by natural resources remaining within national economies? Are young people finding credible pathways into education and productive employment? Are borders becoming corridors for legal commerce rather than zones dominated by trafficking and armed networks? Is regional cooperation reducing the vulnerabilities created by landlocked geography? And are governments acquiring enough economic and institutional capacity to choose among external partners rather than depend excessively on any one of them?

These are harder tests than battlefield victories or diplomatic realignments because they require time. Security operations can produce visible results within weeks. Governments can sign new partnerships within days. Political leaders can announce changes in foreign policy almost immediately. Building courts, schools, tax systems, industries, infrastructure, and public trust takes years.

That difference in time horizons creates another danger. Governments under immediate security pressure naturally seek rapid and visible gains, while the reforms most capable of changing the underlying structure of the crisis are slow, expensive, and politically difficult. Yet without those longer-term investments, tactical victories risk being mistaken for strategic transformation.

The central challenge facing the Sahel is therefore not simply how to defeat armed groups, but how to build states that make those groups progressively less relevant to the lives of ordinary people.

A state ultimately wins not merely when it becomes stronger than an armed organization on the battlefield, but when it becomes more necessary than that organization in the life of the citizen—when its justice is more credible than the justice of the gun, its protection more reliable than that of a militia, its economy more attractive than the economy of smuggling, and the future it offers young people more convincing than migration, illicit networks, or violence.

This is the deeper meaning of the crisis. What appears on the surface to be a war between armies and insurgents conceals a much larger struggle over who has the right and capacity to govern, who controls resources, how wealth is distributed, who sets the rules, and whether political independence can be converted into effective sovereignty.

The decisive question for Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, and the wider Sahel is therefore not only who will win the next battle, which foreign power will gain influence, or which government will survive. It is what kind of state will emerge from this period of upheaval.

Will it be a state that becomes more militarized because it has spent years at war, or one that becomes more institutional because it has learned the limits of military power? Will sovereignty remain primarily a language of resistance to foreign influence, or become the practical ability to finance national priorities, diversify partnerships, produce value, and negotiate from a position of greater strength? Will natural resources continue to leave the region largely as raw materials, or become the foundation for industries, skills, and productive economies? Will peripheral populations continue to experience the state mainly through security forces, or increasingly through courts, schools, healthcare, infrastructure, and economic opportunity?

These questions will determine whether the Sahel is entering another cycle of instability or passing through the painful beginnings of a new political order.

Governments may change. Alliances may shift. Foreign forces may leave and new partners may arrive. Mining contracts may be rewritten and military doctrines revised. But if the underlying relationship between state and citizen remains unchanged, if economic structures continue to reproduce dependence, and if peripheral regions remain weakly integrated into national life, the crisis will return under different names.

The historical test, therefore, is not whether the rulers of the Sahel have changed.

It is whether the state itself has changed.

Because the region’s deepest struggle is not simply to defeat terrorism. It is to transform independence into sovereignty, resources into productive power, borders into connections, populations into citizens, and political authority into a state that people experience not merely as a force above them, but as an institution with a meaningful place in their lives.

Only then will the Sahel have moved beyond managing insecurity toward addressing the deeper crisis from which insecurity continues to emerge.