The split between the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and the Alliance of Sahel States (Alliance des États du Sahel – AES), formalized by the withdrawal of Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger from ECOWAS in January, represents a major political reconfiguration in West Africa. It threatens to exacerbate instability in the Sahel region, which has already been contending with widespread jihadist violence compounded by localized inter-communal tensions over land and resources.
Under the military juntas that seized power between 2020 and 2023, the three AES countries have abandoned many established structures for cooperation with their neighbours and resolutely turned away from the West in line with what they claim to be a rejection of external interferences and an assertion of sovereignty. They insisted on the departure of French, UN and US troops and aligned themselves with Russia, inviting Russian security contractors in and sending their foreign ministers to visit Moscow for the latest high level talks with Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov on 3 April. After forming the AES in 2023, they upgraded the alliance to a formal confederation last July, before announcing a joint military force in January.
The AES’s new announcement of tariffs on imports from non-member states includes coastal ECOWAS countries with which they share a long history of economic integration and unimpeded trade, such as Nigeria. The announcement shows that AES leaders continue to prioritize symbolically loaded political gestures ahead of trade, the cost of living and development. After five years of increasingly bitter political confrontation over the military’s seizure of power in the Sahelian states, the 12 remaining countries of ECOWAS, previously Africa’s most integrated grouping, are now faced with a rival regional bloc.
The crisis also threatens to have a wider international impact on security. The Sahel witnessed 51 per cent of the world’s terrorism-related deaths in 2024. Yet the AES have distanced themselves from longstanding regional security cooperation, at a time when violent extremism, which had already spread from Northern Mali across large tracts of Burkina Faso and western Niger, has continued to reach southwards into the coastal states. Niger has announced its withdrawal from the Multinational Joint Task Force combating Boko Haram in the Lake Chad Basin, and security conditions have become particularly fragile in parts of Benin and Togo since 2021, with militants able to cross porous borders at will.
Shared challenges
This insecurity overlaps with profound development challenges. The Sahel is highly exposed to the impacts of climate change and continues to experience rapid demographic growth: according to the UN, 42 per cent of the population of West and Central Africa is aged under 15. Natural resources and rural livelihoods are under pressure and deeper poverty could further erode stability by exacerbating existing grievances and driving migration.
Meanwhile, trade relationships across the region have been deeply integrated for decades: the coastal West African states provide the crucial main maritime gateways for Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger. The breakdown of this cooperation can only fuel the social and economic pressures that are a major driver of armed group recruitment.
Fortunately, despite the bitter AES split from ECOWAS, various shared regional mechanisms – covering food security, gas and electricity transfer, and economic and monetary affairs – continue to function as before. Last month, Niger turned to Nigeria for assistance after a crippling fuel shortage, and it remains uncertain how far the AES can afford to further deepen the rift with ECOWAS.
The junta leaders have sought to preserve their citizens’ freedom of movement across the region and have chosen so far to remain members of the eight-country West African monetary and economic union (WAEMU), with a common currency, the CFA franc, and central bank, regional financial market, banking regulator and electronic stock exchange.
Security requires cooperation
Although the need to sustain economic growth and livelihoods is a powerful influence upon the Sahel regimes, the prospects for political reintegration into the wider region are remote. However, there is one issue where there may be a mutual openness for cooperation: the struggle to curb violent insecurity, which none of the AES states has managed to significantly reduce.
The AES’s vision for security is rooted in enhanced sovereignty, including funnelling natural resource revenues into stronger militaries; but military combat operations have repeatedly failed when limited to national territory – so regional cooperation remains essential. And this is a matter of high importance to ECOWAS too: as the insurgents reach deeper into the northern areas of West Africa’s coastal states, their governments have little choice but to explore renewed military collaboration with their Sahelian neighbours.
AES leaders have accused ECOWAS of providing insufficient support against jihadist violence, particularly when contrasted with the bloc’s (eventually unfulfilled) threat to intervene militarily following the 2024 coup in Niger. But security collaboration might nonetheless be the first step towards rebuilding the mutual trust that five years of coups and diplomatic confrontation has shattered.
For now, talk of renewed security cooperation is confined to bilateral relations between individual countries, such as Ghana and Burkina Faso, very much based around the personal diplomacy of leaders such as Ghana’s newly elected president, John Mahama. But with security incidents on the northern Mali border refuelling Sahelian distrust of Algeria – whose forces recently took down a Malian drone – offers of security cooperation from individual southern coastal neighbours or even ECOWAS itself could provide reassurance and generate goodwill.
How ECOWAS and AES could reset relations
Going forward, ECOWAS needs to find ways to give the three AES states positive, rather than punitive, incentives to rejoin and restore the region’s unity – effectively swapping some sticks for carrots. AES states are currently not pursuing reconciliation, so the onus is on ECOWAS to act.
The punitive tactics of economic sanctions and threats of military force that ECOWAS initially adopted in response to military takeovers in the so-called ‘coup belt’ did not induce the juntas to climb down, and instead alienated regional public opinion as sanctions drove up the cost-of-living for ordinary Sahelian citizens. There is no reason to believe that a return to a hardline approach now would have any different result.
But at the same time, ECOWAS certainly does not want to abandon its principles on political governance by offering the AES unconditional terms for rejoining. This would signal to coup plotters elsewhere in the region that the undemocratic seizure of power can be free of political and economic costs, and would come hard on the heels of the potentially seductive precedent set by AES in creating a rival confederation.
In practice, ECOWAS will have to find a balance between continued pressure on governance and democracy with cooperation on crucial but lower-profile and intentionally de-politicized issues, such as monetary affairs, food and energy security and, perhaps, discreet intelligence sharing. While seeking to draw the AES back into regional structures without abandoning its own core governance criteria, ECOWAS may find that its most effective lever is not taking a hard line but instead promoting its own attractions and economic growth potential.
The bloc is starting to recognize the scope to enhance its own appeal as an integrated economic space and development partner. In social, economic, political and security terms, the fates of the landlocked Sahelian countries and the nations of coastal West Africa remain tightly intertwined, and they face the same array of transnational threats. Regional unity is the only viable long-term response.
Romane Dideberg, Research Assistant, Africa Programme and Paul Melly, Consulting Fellow, Africa Programme.