To Sahel, one of the most fragile and strategic spaces on the African continent, is a crisis of rarely equal magnitude, where historical, environmental, political and geopolitical dynamics of exceptional complexity intersect.
This vast semi-arid strip, once regulated by subtle balances between Nomadic pastors and sedentary farmers, Today, these ancestral mechanisms are breaking out under the combined weight of demographic pressure, climate change, the proliferation of weapons and the disintegration of traditional authorities.
Economic rivalries for access to land and water are gradually turning into identity fractures, exacerbated by retreating public authorities and the emergence of armed actors who invest in the voids left by the state.
In this already tense landscape, jihadist groups have been able to insinuate with formidable efficiency, instrumentalizing local grievances to impose their order and criminal networks.
The conflict, now opaque and protiform, mixes religious insurgents, community militias, cross-border banditry and self-nomist demands, blurring all traditional reading grids.
Yet, from Washington to Abuja, some actors persist in reducing this complexity to a simplified religious confrontation, thus helping to harden identities and distort political responses.
Beyond the visible confrontations, it is the very cohesion of the Sahelian states that is wavering. The erosion of territorial sovereignty, the collapse of public services, massive population displacements and the increasing militarization of political life herald a silent, diffuse, multiple implosion. The Sahel then becomes the laboratory for a systemic crisis where new forms of power and governance are invented in pain.
To grasp the depth of this change, we must embrace the conflict in all its dimensions: economic, climatic, identity, criminal and geopolitical, and understand that no lasting solution can emerge as long as the reductive readings continue to mask the reality of a region caught in a historical gear of rare intensity.
A territory fractured by history, climate and geopolitics
The contemporary Sahel is the product of a dizzying superposition of historical, economic, environmental and political strata that make any attempt at linear analysis almost impossible. In this space of transition between Sahara and savannah, ancestral conflicts between nomadic and sedentary populations Never disappeared. On the contrary, they were transferred under new pressures: population growth, scarcity of resources, land transformation, weakening of traditional authority, climate crises and progressive delinquent state institutions.
To this intrinsic complexity came added Irruption of jihadist groups, which have been able to exploit the socio-economic flaws to root out in a space in crisis.
At the same time, some international actors, like Donald Trump evoking a « genocide of Christians » in Nigeria, project simplistic readings on a deeply multidimensional conflict.
The result is an imbroglio in which land issues, identity claims, political calculations, criminal trafficking, jihadist insurrections and the gradual collapse of the sovereignty of several Sahelian states are involved.
The aim of this article is to reconstruct this mosaic by making it intelligible, without yielding to shortcuts, by identifying the deep logics that structure violence and by highlighting the dynamics of state erosion that announce a possible functional implosion of the Sahel.
Hostages of the conflict: a centuries-old rivalry between nomadic pastors and sedentary farmers
The first frame of the Sahelian conflict has its roots in a dual social organization where nomads and sedentary have lived together for centuries. The pastoral peoples (Tuaregs, Peuls/Fulani, Moorish Arabs) cross thousands of kilometres in search of pastures and water points. The sedentary peoples (Dogons, Bambaras, Mossis, Haousas and so many others) occupy fertile valleys and organize their economy around cereal crops.
This fragile cohabitation was once based on robust customary regulations: transhumance corridors, traditional chief arbitration systems, tacit resource sharing standards.
With the advent of political and economic modernity, these mechanisms have gradually lost their effectiveness. Population expansion, the cultivation of old pastures and environmental degradation associated with repeated droughts have created a new balance of power. Where negotiations and local arrangements have previously been carried out, are emerging today. clashes, reprisals and the rise of community militias.
The agro-pastoral question becomes, for lack of credible institutional regulation, the first driver of a cycle of structural violence that goes far beyond simple land sharing: It sethnicizes, territorializes and intensifies, preparing the ground for wider political and ideological instrumentalities.
Climate pressure, demographic pressure: resource scarcity as a catalyst for crisis
The Sahel is one of the global epicentres of climate change. The variability of rainfall, desertification, seasonal irregularity and progressive advance of drylands profoundly transform pastoral dynamics. Wells and pools disappear or move, pastures shrink, transhumances lengthen, and communities find themselves in direct competition for resources that have never been so rare.
At the same time, the Sahelian demographics explode. Agricultural areas are spreading to the detriment of pastoral areas, fences are increasing, land once considered collective is privately owned or under opaque concessions. The agrarian system reaches its physical limits, and tensions turn into deadly clashes in which the boundary between land conflict and identity conflict becomes indistinct.
This dynamic constitutes the matrix of contemporary rural violence. It explains why the conflict cannot be understood exclusively in religious or political terms. It is, in the first place, a struggle for survival in an increasingly constrained ecosystem.
jihadist entry: a methodical instrumentalization of local fractures
The rise of jihadist groups in the region cannot be interpreted as the mere deployment of an imported ideology. Rather, it corresponds to the ability of these groups to seize a strategic opportunity in fragile societies. Katibas affiliated with Al Qaeda or the Islamic State are linked to inherited tensions, offering land arbitration, protection, expeditious justice and minimal order in areas where the State is absent.
This strategy is based on three pillars.
First, pose as a safe and judicial substitute in abandoned rural areas, giving them pragmatic consent from people seeking authority.
Then, exploiting identity grievances and perceived discrimination, particularly in the small communities of central Mali or in the agro-pastoral regions of Nigeria.
Finally, hybridizing jihadism and crime Tax on roads, control of artisanal gold-making, kidnapping for ransom, cross-border trafficking.
Thus, violence is no longer strictly ideological: it becomes a political economy of war, where armed actors, jihadists or not, operate in a criminal ecosystem that is confused with the local socio-economic environment. The distinction between « rebel », « jihadist », « Bandit » or « Community militiaman » loses any analytical relevance.
The error of religious interpretation: the case of Nigeria and the rhetoric of "Christian genocide"
In the violence in Nigeria, religious overinterpretation occupies a special place. While the denominational dimension exists objectively in some parts of the central and northern parts of the country, it is not the core of the conflict.
The clashes between Christian farmers and Muslim farmers Fulani are first and foremost a reflection of rural insecurity, land competition and the chronic weakness of the state.
Yet this complexity is often crushed by the discourse of some international leaders. Donald Trumpin a series of statements, accused the Nigeria to pursue a policy of genocide of Christians.
This reading grid, in circulation in certain circles American Evangelicals, reduces a multidimensional crisis to a Manichean religious shock. It ignores the large number of Muslim victims in areas under the control of Boko Haram or the Islamic State, minimizes the criminal nature of armed actors and transforms the suffering of part of Christian communities into a tool for transnational political mobilization.
By imposing a religious reading at the expense of structural causes, This type of discourse increases the risk of denominational polarization and contributes paradoxically to the extension of the conflict.
Mali as a laboratory of chaos: between Tuarègue claims, jihadism and state vacillation
Mali the symbolic and operational heart of the Sahelian crisis. It alone concentrates the three major conflict layers: Tuarègue insurgency, transnational jihadism and agro-pastoral violence.
To the north, the question of the Azawad refers to a long series of rebellions expressing the political and economic marginalization of the people touarègues. The aborted secession of 2012, driven by MNLA, was parasitized by the jihadist groups that quickly supplanted the nationalist insurgents.
The French military intervention, followed by MINUSMA, stopped the progress of the jihadists without resolving the root causes of the conflict.
In the centre The crisis takes a different form. These are no longer the Tuaregs but the communities People which are at the heart of a chain of violence where pastoral disputes overlap with self-defense abuses dogon and the calamity of the Malian armed forces. The jihadists exploit these fractures to impose their order and consolidate their territorial control.
Finally, Political levelMali is undergoing a brutal recomposition. The successive coups d'état, the withdrawal of international forces, the security alliance with Russia and the breakup of the Algiers agreements exacerbate internal tensions and cause the country to change its position. a fragmentation logic. The territory is recomposed according to moving control lines: State-held areas, CMA-held areas, jihadist-influenced areas, de facto self-defence-administered areas.
Mali is no longer a state in crisis, but a state plural, where several competing authorities coexist on the same map.
The progressive collapse of Sahelian states: a functional implosion more than territorial
One of the most serious consequences of the Sahelian crisis is the progressive collapse of state sovereignty. The state is retreating, not only militarily, but administratively, fiscally and symbolically.
In whole sections of the Mali, Niger and Burkina Fasopublic servants no longer move, courts no longer sit, schools close, health centres disappear, markets are controlled by armed groups.
This loss of territorial control is accompanied by an erosion of political legitimacy: governments, unable to protect people, become hostages to armies or exasperated public opinion.
Massive displacements of populations: emptied villages, rural exoduses to coastal capitals, breakdown of pastoral economies, disaggregation of rural societies and feeding uprooted, hopeless youth, quick to join militias or emigrate.
Chain coups in the region are evidence of this structural governance crisis. They never restore order; They seek above all to restore the lost authority, without being able to deal with the root causes of the collapse.
A systemic crisis: going beyond simplistic readings to understand the Sahelian gear
The Sahelian crisis can only be understood by holding together several dimensions at once. It is ecological, demographic, economic, political, community, religious and criminal.. It combines local rivalries with international interference. It combines microscopic land conflicts and global geopolitical logics.
Religion plays a role, but rarely the one that outside observers imagine. She's a vector a political language, an identity marker among others. It often masks otherwise more prosaic struggles: access to pastures, control of commercial roads, ownership of mining resources, intercommunal revenge, quest for local elite legitimacy.
What is at stake in the Sahel is not just a conflict but a historical transformation : the recomposition of power, the fragmentation of national spaces, the emergence of new armed actors and the redefinition of relations between centre and periphery.
It is the crisis of an imported state model, unable to integrate pastoral logics, land realities, composite identities and ecological challenges of an immense and heterogeneous territory.
A Sahel at the edge of the swing, but not condemned to collapse
The implosion of the Sahelian states is not an abstract scenario: it is already perceptible in the grey areas where the state has disappearedin cities saturated with displaced persons, in the fragmentation of Mali, in the emergence of new regional military alliances, and in the proliferation of armed groups that replace institutions.
Yet this implosion is functional rather than territorial: borders remain intact, but the authority they are supposed to contain is dissolved.
Understanding this crisis requires the elimination of reductive readings, especially religious ones, which obscure the deep roots of conflicts. The Sahel is the place of a collision between history, geography, demography and geopolitics. At the same time, it is a laboratory for future transformations for other regions facing the same structural tensions.
It is by re-establishing space, rebuilding institutions rooted in local realities, rehabilitating traditional regulatory mechanisms, and investing in marginalized territories that may emerge, perhaps a way out. Otherwise, the Sahel will continue to be fragmented, not in sudden chaos, but in a silent, methodical and relentless erosion.
