The militaries in six West African countries—Mali, Chad, Burkina Faso, Guinea, Niger, and Gabon—decided relatively recently to remove civilian governments given the deteriorating security situation in the region. They achieved their goals separately by deploying relatively little force, instead seeking legitimation in a political vacuum that has been widening for more than a decade in parts of West and Central Africa. As I argued in my previous article, the escalation of local and regional conflicts should be viewed in the context of the disintegration of the post-World War II global hegemonic system dominated by the United States and its Western allies, and the subsequent rise of new power contenders, leading to the intensification of anti- and inter-imperialist struggles world-wide. Sadly, the escalation of imperialist rivalries has detrimental effects on the majority of people living in the global peripheries, where these complex conflicts take the most explicit form of war and plunder.
The military takeovers have been celebrated unequivocally by the local people in the Sahel with the expectation that more direct military control might stabilize the otherwise deteriorating security situation caused by the spread of insurgent paramilitary groups. In contrast, Western-allied neighboring governments and commentators remained wary that a possible knock-on effect of falling civilian governments could have far-reaching military, security, and political consequences throughout and beyond the region. Most of the countries in the Sahel are now under the control of military juntas. Now mocked as the Coup or Junta belt, these countries are confronted on many frontlines by insurgent separatists, Western powers, and members of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS).
The threat of a region-wide war between the Western-backed ECOWAS and the coalition of the juntas (seeking international support), has substantially risen since the coup in Niger in July 2023; while the unfolding separatist insurgency continues unabated in many parts of the region. The whole Sahel is on the verge of becoming yet another proxy war zone like the ones in the Middle East, Ukraine, or the Caucasus, raising doubts about the possibility of social, economic, or security improvements any time soon. The changing power configuration, however, could also entail the possibility of a complete decolonization that has been stalled in many of these countries since their formal independence.
Military coups are not entirely unknown in the wider region; Mali experienced a short-lived coup d’état in 2012 which ended with re-transitioning to civilian government due to the massive pressure from the West and ECOWAS; while Egypt, one of North Africa’s giants went through a similar experience in 2013, however, that country remained under military leadership which Western powers eventually recognized. There have been several unsuccessful coup attempts as well, such as in Gambia in 2022, and two failed internal coup attempts in the Burkina military just this year.
Although each coup has specific contextual characteristics, common dynamics in terms of how the Sahel as a geographical region has been integrated into the capitalist world-system can also be detected through a holistic historical approach. From this perspective, it is important to note that most of the countries recently experiencing military takeovers are former French colonies, thus this legacy seems to be one of the key driving forces of shifting power relations. This was also demonstrated by the fact that popular grievances against France burst out throughout the region, particularly in Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, and Guinea. The fact that hostility towards France was not only ignited by the coup leaders but shared by large segments of the local population should not come as a surprise, as the legacy of colonialism has been vividly present up to this day.
Before colonization, the Sahel had a complex socio-ecological web of life. Its fertile lands gave home to diverse agricultural societies, while interethnic marriages were not uncommon even between pastoralist herdsmen such as the Fulani people, or traders of the Sahara, such as the Tuaregs, or settled farmers cultivating the fertile land, like the Hausa people. For many centuries before the European intrusion, the Trans-Sahara trade connected North and West Africa, from the gold mines of Mali and Ghana in the forestry coastal regions, through to Cairo in the Northeast of the Nile, and Nubia in the Southeast, to the global trade circuits of the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean. These trade networks largely coalesced with the spread of Islam which has been the predominant legal-cultural regulatory system throughout the Sahel up until today. It would not be an exaggeration to call the region one of Africa’s breadbaskets which had seemingly inspired the French to conquer and integrate this complex geography under a singular colonial system.
The French intrusion peaked during the so-called “Scramble for Africa” which was in fact largely fueled by imperialist rivalry and the subsequent European expansion on the continent after the Berlin Conference in 1884, similar to the inter-imperialist struggles reemerging today. France’s initial aim was to challenge Britain’s fading global hegemony by establishing a colonial hinterland similar to the backbone of the British Empire, without which Britain would not have been able to sustain its global military, industrial, and commercial power for so long in the 19th century. In the case of British hegemony, India’s subjugation served the purpose of this imperial project, hence the French aspiration was to acquire a comparably large territory with similar precious resources. Therefore, the French colonial conquest concentrated on the old Sudan, which historically encompassed much of what is the Sahel today.
Although the scattered map of West Africa created by this imperialist rivalry was not the initial desire of French colonialism (which aimed to unify the whole region), France could never successfully challenge any global power by infinitely using West and Central Africa’s resources. However, once the political structure of the colonial system solidified after the scramble, France was able to establish its own hegemonic system within West Africa. During the belle epoque of the colonial period, the French administrators, in order to “develop their colonies,” ended the communal use of the vast grasslands, rupturing the ecological balance between pastoralists, farmers, and the soil, the latter being able to regenerate thanks to the ancient practices of extensive crop rotation. This agro-ecological reciprocal practice was replaced by cotton and groundnut plantations and other monocultural export crops, leading to the massive depletion of the soil. As Mahmood Mamdani showed in the case of Darfur, the tribalization and administrative division of the different ethnic groups—which otherwise had fluid interethnic boundaries—combined with the desertification of their fertile land, proved to be catastrophic for men and nature alike. Although it led to massive resistance, and ultimately to national liberation throughout North and West Africa, France was never shy of interfering in West African politics in order to contain anyone who was viewed as a threat to the status quo. France’s effort to sustain its regional power continued even after the former colonies gained independence in the 1960s, which has become the fundamental doctrine of the so-called Françafrique.
Françafrique’s neocolonial modus operandi was built to preserve important colonial policies, e.g., the so-called CFA franc zone which French president De Gaulle established in 1945 to control the finances of the West and Central African colonies. The monetary supervision within the CFA area was, however, part of a more grandiose project than just protecting France’s economic interests in West Africa. The new post-war hegemonic system based on the US-led global economic and political reconstruction was aimed at the geoeconomic reorientation of European colonial powers with the beginning of the Cold War. The US encouraged European integration into what later became the European Union with the prospect of a single European market, while at the same time assisting the opening of colonial markets for American companies. The US needed allies to contain the then Soviet Union, for which France was the preferred partner in West Africa.
By replacing the old colonial system with European integration, the French-German geoeconomic tandem has become the cornerstone of America’s global reconstruction. Both Germany and France profited from the hegemonic transition. Germany gained economic dominance in the EU with the Deutschmark (later euro), the Frankfurt-based European Central Bank and German industry accessed economic satellites in Southern and Eastern Europe via EU enlargement. In a similar fashion, France could reestablish economic dominance in West and Central Africa through monetary and economic control. For example, France retained the CFA system in the West African Monetary Union with the continuation of an exchange rate mechanism pegged to the French currency (later the euro) and the holding back of 50% of the member states’ foreign reserves at the French Central Bank. Therefore, France has profited enormously by using African reserves for various financial transactions, e.g., as collateral for the future European Central Bank. Moreover, French banks accounted for some 70% of the total turnover in the Western and Central CFA zones, while the French Central Bank sustained its veto right on the board of the two affiliated local central banks, the West African Economic and Monetary Union (UEMOA) and Economic and Monetary Community of Central Africa (CEMAC).
Thus, impoverished West…
