ECOWAS-AES split — Vincent Foucher on West African security after the coups
Vincent Foucher at the CNRS has tracked the security politics of West Africa for two decades. His reading of the Mali-Burkina-Niger Alliance of Sahel States (AES) departure from ECOWAS treats it as the consolidation of a coherent regional bloc, not a transient post-coup posture.
Key fact
AES combined population: ~71 million; combined territory covers approximately 2.78 million km² of the Sahel (World Bank, 2024).
Vincent Foucher, research fellow at France's CNRS attached to the Institut des mondes africains and a long-standing specialist on West African political-military dynamics, has been one of the most careful chroniclers of the 2020-2023 wave of Sahelian coups and their consolidation into the Alliance of Sahel States.
The chronology: Mali's August 2020 coup, with a second transitional reshuffle in May 2021. Burkina Faso's January 2022 coup with a follow-on September 2022 reshuffle. Niger's July 2023 coup. In September 2023 the three states formed the Liptako-Gourma Charter establishing the Alliance of Sahel States (AES). In January 2024 they announced their departure from ECOWAS. In July 2024 the AES upgraded itself to a confederation.
Foucher's analytical move is to refuse the dominant framings. He rejects the simple 'African Frances afrique pushback' reading that overweights anti-French sentiment as the cause. He rejects the 'Russian Wagner manipulation' reading that treats the Sahel juntas as proxies of Moscow. He rejects the ECOWAS reading that treats the juntas as constitutional-transition negotiating partners.
His framework instead emphasises three Sahel-specific dynamics. First, two decades of jihadist insurgency in the tri-border region (Liptako-Gourma) that civilian governments in Bamako, Ouagadougou, and Niamey were structurally unable to contain. Second, the political delegitimisation of the French Operation Barkhane counterterrorism mission in the eyes of urban Sahelian publics, well before the coups. Third, the existence of a coherent reform programme within Sahelian military circles that the coups were designed to implement, not just an opportunistic seizure.
On the AES confederation, Foucher's reading is that it is a consolidated regional bloc with its own currency project, joint military command, and shared diplomatic posture vis-à-vis France, the US, ECOWAS, and Russia. Russian and Turkish security cooperation is real and substantial but is treated by the AES governments as one set of partnerships among others — not as alignment.
His policy conclusion is that the ECOWAS-AES split is structural rather than temporary, that re-integration on ECOWAS terms is not available, and that the Western analytical framework that treats Sahelian governments as failing or captured states obscures more than it explains.
Vincent Foucher, senior researcher at the French CNRS and previously senior West Africa analyst at the International Crisis Group, has produced the most consistent French-language analysis of the post-2020 Sahel coup sequence and its institutional consequences for the Economic Community of West African States. His work, including the 2024 Politique africaine essay and ongoing Le Monde Diplomatique pieces, frames the ECOWAS-AES split as the institutional codification of a security-and-political fault line that had been widening since the early 2010s.
The coup sequence covered Mali (August 2020 and May 2021), Guinea (September 2021), Burkina Faso (January and September 2022), and Niger (July 2023). In each case the military-led transitional government repudiated the constitutional electoral schedule and inserted a longer-than-anticipated transition timeline, plus a rotation of external security partnerships away from France (and to varying degrees from ECOWAS and the broader Western development architecture) toward Russia's Wagner Group (now reorganised under the Africa Corps brand) and toward selective Chinese and Turkish supplemental partnerships.
The Alliance of Sahel States, announced in September 2023 by Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, formalised the coordination that had been operational between the three military governments. The Alliance's January 2024 announcement of withdrawal from ECOWAS, followed by the July 2024 signing of the Confederation of Sahel States treaty in Niamey, represents the most significant institutional fragmentation of West African regional architecture since ECOWAS's 1975 founding. The three states represent approximately 17% of the population of the historical ECOWAS area and a smaller share of GDP, but they cover a significant share of the Sahel security perimeter.
The ECOWAS-side response was constrained by the institutional tools available. The post-coup sanctions package imposed on Mali in January 2022, and the subsequent threats of military intervention in Niger in August 2023, were the strongest instruments ECOWAS attempted. Neither produced the intended constitutional restoration. The Niger threat was operationally deferred when the political conditions for an ECOWAS Standby Force deployment did not materialise — both because of domestic political opposition in the contributing member states and because of the strategic risk profile of a Sahel-wide intervention into a country bordering the existing Mali-Burkina Faso AES bloc.
The French security-presence dimension is the layer Foucher's analysis emphasises most carefully. Operation Barkhane, the French Sahel-region counterterrorism deployment that peaked at 5,100 troops in 2020, drew down progressively through 2021 and 2022 under what Foucher reads as a French domestic-political decision that had been internally taken before the juntas demanded withdrawal. The collision was about timing and the optics of exit rather than the direction of policy. The French formal-deployment exit from mainland Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger was complete by end-2023; the operational presence in the broader region (Chad, Côte d'Ivoire, Senegal) has continued under reformatted arrangements.
The longer-run West African security-architecture question is what stabilises in the post-split institutional landscape. ECOWAS's residual mandate covers a coastal-and-savannah majority of the historical area — Senegal, The Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, Togo, Benin, Nigeria — within which the institutional norms on constitutional government remain in force. The AES bloc has developed its own institutional architecture, including joint-force frameworks, customs-and-trade arrangements that substitute for the ECOWAS norms its members repudiated, and external partnerships that include selective alignment with Russia, China, Turkey, Iran, and the Gulf states. Whether the split stabilises as two parallel orders or recombines under future political shifts in one or more of the AES states is the open structural question for the next decade.
The forward-looking implication of this analysis is that the structural drivers identified above will continue to shape policy trajectories across the second half of the 2020s. The doctrinal frameworks, institutional arrangements, and bilateral relationships described in the preceding sections are durable across multiple electoral cycles in the participating capitals, and any disruption of them would require shifts in underlying interests rather than rhetorical adjustment. The analytical reading developed here is not a prediction of a specific outcome at a specific date. It is a framework for reading the next round of developments — the summits, the policy announcements, the data releases, the bilateral and multilateral diplomatic moves — against the structural constraints the framework identifies. Each subsequent development can be read as confirming or refining the framework's predictions, and the cumulative pattern across multiple developments is what produces the analytical clarity that policy work most often needs. The headline-driven coverage of any specific event will continue to misread the broader trajectory; the data-driven, frame-anchored reading developed here is the antidote to that misreading and is the analytical discipline the policy community most needs across the remainder of the decade. The arithmetic of the underlying interests does not change quickly. The political and rhetorical surface above the arithmetic does change, sometimes quickly, and reading the two together is what produces analytical durability and policy-relevant insight that survives the news cycle.
The institutional research that underwrites this reading — the policy papers, the journal articles, the open-source datasets, and the running track records of the named scholars — represents a body of work substantially larger than any single explainer can summarise. Readers seeking deeper engagement should consult the primary sources cited in the preceding sections directly. The reading developed here aims to be a useful entry point rather than a substitute for that primary literature, and the framing has been chosen to surface the analytical moves that carry the most explanatory weight across the largest set of subsequent developments. A reader returning to this material in a year, in three years, or in five years should still find the framework usable, because the structural relationships it describes change more slowly than the headline developments they organise. The decade ahead will produce many specific events that this analysis cannot anticipate. The framework, if it is the right one, will help organise those events as they arrive.