Source: Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE) | Published: 2026-06-12
Category: 아프리카 정치경제 | Keywords: funding, sahel, france, security, governance, imperialism
The Sahel has emerged as the most consequential theatre of jihadist violence in the contemporary world, surpassing even the conflict zones of the Middle East in terms of terror-related fatalities. This grim transformation has unfolded with startling speed: barely two decades ago, the vast semi-arid belt stretching across Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger was largely peripheral to global security discussions. Today, it accounts for nearly half of all terrorism-related deaths worldwide, hosting two of the most lethal non-state armed organizations currently operating — the Al-Qaeda-affiliated Jama'at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM) and the Islamic State's Sahel Province. Against this backdrop, a provocative and analytically significant question has entered scholarly and policy discourse: to what extent have the structural features of French engagement in the region — spanning military operations, economic interests, and governance relationships — inadvertently, or perhaps systematically, contributed to the conditions that have allowed jihadist movements to flourish? The article published in the Review of African Political Economy confronts this question with a directness that reflects the journal's longstanding commitment to structuralist and post-colonial political economy frameworks, situating French imperialism not merely as historical backdrop but as a living and consequential force in shaping the Sahel's security crisis.
To understand the weight of this argument, one must reckon with the temporal paradox at the heart of the Sahel crisis. French military presence in the region has been sustained and substantial. Operation Serval, launched in 2013 following the rapid advance of jihadist forces toward Bamako, was widely praised as a decisive intervention that prevented the fall of the Malian state. It was succeeded by Operation Barkhane, a multi-country counterterrorism mission involving thousands of French troops that formally ended in 2022. Yet the security trajectory across the Sahelian corridor grew progressively worse over the entire duration of these interventions. JNIM expanded its territorial reach from northern Mali into central and southern zones, crossing into Burkina Faso and Niger. Civilian fatalities mounted, displacement accelerated, and state authority receded. The ROAPE article appears to engage with this paradox not as a puzzle of operational failure but as a structural outcome — questioning whether the frameworks and incentives governing French engagement produced dynamics that, however unintentionally, served to sustain rather than resolve the conflict. This framing draws on a rich tradition within African political economy scholarship that interrogates the gap between the stated objectives of external actors and the material consequences of their presence.
One dimension of this analysis concerns the political economy of French economic interests in the Sahelian states. Niger, in particular, has historically been critical to France's nuclear energy sector as a major supplier of uranium, with the French state-linked company Orano operating mining concessions that represent a strategic interest of considerable magnitude. Critics have long observed that the architecture of Françafrique — the informal network of political, economic, and personal ties linking French elites to African heads of state — has consistently prioritized the stability of extractive arrangements over the development of democratic governance or the meaningful redistribution of resource revenues to affected populations. When states are captured by elite compacts that serve external economic interests while excluding rural and marginalized populations, the resulting grievances become fertile recruitment ground for armed movements that present themselves as alternatives to a corrupt and foreign-dominated order. The article's core provocation — whether France is funding terrorism — may be less a literal claim about direct financial transfers to jihadist groups than a structural argument about how the political economy of French presence generates the social conditions in which terrorism thrives.
The governance dimension of this analysis connects to broader debates in the ODA and development literature about the relationship between external support and state legitimacy. Across the Sahel, governments that have historically depended on French diplomatic protection, budgetary support, and military backing have had weakened incentives to construct the political legitimacy necessary to govern effectively in peripheral regions. The populations of northern and central Mali, the Liptako-Gourma tri-border zone, and the rural hinterlands of Burkina Faso have experienced decades of administrative neglect, security force abuses, and economic marginalization. International aid flows, including French development assistance channeled through the Agence Française de Développement, have in many instances reinforced existing governance structures without addressing the underlying social contracts that determine how citizens relate to their states. When jihadist organizations offer a semblance of justice, dispute resolution, and protection — however coercive — they are filling a vacuum that both the Sahelian states and their external partners have failed to address. The ROAPE contribution situates this vacuum not as an accident but as a predictable consequence of an engagement model premised on maintaining particular political arrangements rather than transforming them.
The broader regional significance of this analysis has become impossible to ignore following the military coups in Mali (2020 and 2021), Burkina Faso (2022), and Niger (2023), which collectively signaled a fundamental rupture in the Françafrique arrangement. The juntas in all three countries expelled French military forces, terminated security cooperation agreements, and in some cases turned toward Russia's Wagner Group — now rebranded as the Africa Corps — as a security partner. Popular sentiment in urban centers, amplified by social media and genuinely felt grievances, increasingly cast France not as a security guarantor but as a predatory presence. Whether or not one accepts the most structurally deterministic versions of the argument advanced in the ROAPE article, the political reality is that large portions of Sahelian publics have arrived at conclusions consonant with its thesis. This is itself a finding of profound policy relevance. The legitimacy deficit of Western security partnerships in the region is no longer a theoretical concern — it has produced concrete geopolitical realignments that are reshaping the architecture of African security governance.
For practitioners and researchers working at the intersection of ODA, security, and political economy, the article's significance extends beyond the specific case of France and the Sahel. It raises foundational questions about accountability in security assistance, about how the metrics used to evaluate counterterrorism interventions consistently fail to capture structural drivers of armed mobilization, and about the ethical responsibilities of donor states whose economic interests are entangled with the governance failures they claim to address. Looking forward, the consolidation of anti-French military governments across the Sahel is unlikely to resolve the underlying security crisis — the evidence from the Wagner presence in Mali suggests that brutal counterinsurgency tactics have deepened civilian suffering without meaningfully degrading JNIM's organizational capacity. What the post-French moment in the Sahel does create, however, is an opportunity for more honest reckoning with what two decades of externally led counterterrorism achieved and what it failed to achieve. Scholars working in the tradition of the Review of African Political Economy will have a critical role to play in that reckoning, insisting that structural and historical analysis accompany any serious assessment of how the Sahel arrived at this juncture — and what genuinely transformative alternatives might look like.