On 25 April, Mali was plunged into a fresh security crisis following coordinated strikes by a new alliance of Tuareg separatist rebels and al-Qaeda-linked jihadists. The alliance targeted several strategic locations simultaneously, most notably the military stronghold of Kati, where a car bomb killed Defense Minister General Sadio Camara alongside members of his family. With the head of the junta, General Assimi Goïta, only returning to public view yesterday for the first time since the attacks began and several northern towns reportedly falling to rebel forces, the future of the Malian state has once again been called into question.

The offensive is the latest tremor in a regional collapse that has seen the Sahel become a centre of political instability. Over the last three years, a “coup contagion” has swept across the region: military juntas have seized power in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger. Yet, despite the expulsion of Western forces and a turn towards Russian military support, extremist violence has only intensified, leaving state authority increasingly confined to major cities while swathes of the rural interior remain controlled by an ‘oligopoly’ of armed groups.

To make sense of these developments, we spoke with Rahmane Idrissa, a preeminent Nigerien political scientist and historian, whose essay “Statemania” appeared in Equator’s launch. He is the author of The Politics of Islam in the Sahel and a forthcoming history of the Songhay Empire.

Gavin Jacobson: To what extent is the current offensive in Mali unprecedented?

Rahmane Idrissa: The violence itself isn’t unprecedented by the standards of the Sahel. What is spectacular is the way this particular insurgency was organised – the jihadists and rebels were able to strike multiple points simultaneously – particularly in Kidal, the symbolic capital of the region claimed by the Tuareg rebels, and Kati, the headquarters of the Malian army. These two places are 1500 kilometres apart.

In Kidal, they managed to expel both the Malian army and their Russian auxiliaries. At Kati, they killed the defence minister – an extremely important figure, the man who brought the Russians in, who spoke Russian, and who had received military training in Russia. He drove that whole policy. The intelligence chief was also seriously wounded. So the insurgents have essentially decapitated the security apparatus of the Malian state. Assimi Goïta was in hiding until 29 April, leaving the state silent and its citizens disorientated. The junta can no longer offer a solution to this crisis, and it has in fact turned into an obstacle to a solution. People are now asking who is really in charge and who might succeed them.

How surprised are you by their level of success?

It’s not the first time they’ve attacked Kati; there was a previous attempt in 2022. But the level of success, and its consequences, are new. Mali might reconsider its alliance with Russia, were it not for the fact that it has become so dependent on it. In any case, there are a lot of accusations flying around about how the Russians betrayed Mali by negotiating their surrender in Kidal. And bases are falling: Malian soldiers are negotiating with jihadists and leaving positions across the northern parts of the country, including Labbezanga, a major outpost south of Gao near the Niger border. So the question is: will jihadists start taking cities? Until now they’ve operated in the countryside, but if they control the bases that protect urban centres in the north, what is the game plan? We don’t know yet.

Can you tell us about the junta that rules Mali? It once promised to transition back to civilian rule but has long since abandoned that agenda. What does it actually want? Does it have a coherent governing vision, or is it primarily focused on self-preservation?

Or maybe just power, which is a motivation of many politicians, not just in Africa. We have this perhaps delusional idea that people want power as a means to an end, but it can be the end in itself. The military in the Sahel see themselves as a political elite. The political history of modern Mali can really be summarised as a power struggle between civilian and military elites. The military has ruled for longer than the civilians.

How popular is the junta?

The junta has been generally supported by the population, who see the military as legitimate political leaders. When the military came to power they did so with the usual claim that they were there to end corruption, restore integrity, and pursue development under a stricter kind of rule. People buy that. But I doubt the military themselves buy it, because if you look at what they’ve done you see plenty of corruption. What’s more, it’s difficult to denounce their corruption, because they’ve done away with the institutions of oversight. They say, for instance, that no one can scrutinise the defence budget because it’s a state secret. Which of course means they can do whatever they want with that money.

Several neighbouring states – Burkina Faso, Niger – are also under military rule. To what extent is it useful to see these as similar cases, part of a so-called “coup belt”? Or are the differences more significant?

Mali, Niger and Burkina all essentially follow the same pattern. Guinea is something else: they’ve restarted a process of constitutional rule, albeit heading towards electoral authoritarianism. But in the other three you can see something spreading, almost like oil spreading across a surface: beginning in Mali, then into Burkina, and then Niger. They talk to each other. They’ve created the Alliance of Sahel States, which is about collective security and mutual help, but which is fairly inefficient, as the events of the past few days have shown. In reality, it functions as a kind of syndicate of dictators.

Where is this heading?

They are steadily moving towards establishing a type of military regime that would be permanent and non-democratic, with the army’s control seen not as an exception but as the norm – what I call a “stratocracy”. Before, when armies took power, they always said it was a temporary suspension of the constitution; these new Sahelian regimes envision military rule as the standard. About ten days ago, Burkina Faso’s Ibrahim Traoré made a speech essentially saying Burkina doesn’t need democracy – that “people need to forget the issue of democracy”.

They’ve dismantled the infrastructure of democracy almost in harmony – one state begins, the others follow. They have banned political parties and destroyed the conditions for civil society. So this is not just a “coup belt”. It’s closer to a military revolution, though the revolution they want is not a progressive one. It is a break from constitutional norms, an attempt to invent a new type of regime, almost as some Islamists want to invent a new type of caliphate.

Across the Sahel there have been AI-generated videos of figures like Traoré making fake speeches, fake celebrity endorsements – going viral even when viewers seem to know they’re not real. Who is producing this content, who is it for, and what political work is it doing?

There are many young people in Burkina employed to do this – for money, for excitement, and because they’ve been enlisted in a social media operation that has developed across all three military regimes. They are part of an ecosystem of social media warriors known in the region as “vidéomans”. These influencers produce content and rants in support of the regimes and for the purpose of manufacturing consent. It’s not entirely unlike the LEGO-hip-hop productions coming out of Iran.

To what extent are these military leaders unified by a genuine anti-Western posture, and to what extent is it just domestic political theatre? How much has the shift in the region been driven by anger with France specifically?

The anti-Western sentiment was not invented by the juntas; they’ve exploited something that already existed, and not just in the Sahel. It’s found across Africa, and I think it comes from a deeply conservative-nationalist feeling. What they actually reproach the West for is not the West in itself but progressive liberalism. The most contentious issue at this moment is LGBT rights. They’ve criminalised homosexuality in Burkina, Mali and Senegal, which isn’t a coup country but where you have deep-seated homophobia that justifies itself through anti-Westernism: the West is trying to change our societies in a nefarious way, and we must resist. Alongside the conservative aspect is a nationalism that portrays the West as inherently imperialistic, with imperialism being something uniquely Western. China cannot be imperialistic, Russia cannot be imperialistic. You see this in the UN resolution Ghana pushed through in March this year, which condemned the transatlantic slave trade as the worst crime against humanity; not any other slave trade, not the trans-Saharan trade, which began earlier and lasted longer, not slavery within Africa itself.

Where does the specifically anti-French dimension come from?

France pursued colonial and neo-colonial policies in Africa until the 1990s, so there are historical reasons. But if you listen to what people are saying, it’s not those policies they’re denouncing but France as a kind of superlative incarnation of Western imperialism. A lot of this discourse comes from France itself. France has an extremely strong anti-imperialist left, allied with African nationalists. The concept of “Françafrique” was given its explosive political charge by French activists from the mid-1980s. There’s an association – Survie – that published a book in 2021 called France: The Empire That Does Not Want to Die. What struck me was how essentialist the portrayal was: France is by essence an enemy of Africa and can never be anything else.

The Wagner Group, now rebranded as Africa Corps, was supposed to aid the Malian government in precisely such events. Why has it proved so ineffective, and why does the junta continue to rely on it?

It’s ineffective partly because of its policy of brute force. You cannot end an insurgency by simply killing people – which is basically their only idea. You need a political solution; force should be one tool among many. This is part of why the junta didn’t like the French, because the French were not willing to rely on force alone to pacify restless separatists and insurgencies. In 2013 the French fought alongside Malians in Operation Serval, which halted the advance of Islamist insurgents; I interviewed French officers who were shocked at the ease with which Malian soldiers killed civilians based on ethnicity. That’s why they refused to allow the Malian army into the Kidal region, which was a clear violation of Malian sovereignty, and which genuinely angered Malians. At the time I didn’t believe the French explanation. But after I saw what the Malians did with Wagner, I think the French were probably right.

And Wagner itself?

They’re mercenaries with a mercenary mentality: stealing, extortion, controlling artisanal gold mines and taxing access to them. That’s not how you wage a counterinsurgency. It only results in more resentment, more enemies. And their methods were brutish; where the French used surveillance and targeted the jihadist leadership, Wagner tortured people seemingly for sport rather than for actionable intelligence. I never expected Wagner to succeed. The French, with a far higher level of operational sophistication, didn’t manage it. Wagner simply made things worse.

You’ve described the Sahel as an “ultra-periphery” – twice removed from the core of the global economy. How far back does that structural marginalisation go, and does understanding its origins change how we think about the present crisis?

I’d trace it to the sixteenth century. The Songhay Empire – which covered essentially the same territory as Mali, Burkina and Niger do today – existed during a pivotal era in history when the global economic arrangement that had existed since antiquity was being destroyed and replaced. I call the old system the “trade meridian”: it was based on three great population basins – China, India, and Mesopotamia-Mediterranean – through which the world’s gold flowed towards Asia, which produced most of the world’s goods. It was a horizontal system, without a core-periphery structure. The Songhay Empire was a kind of mini-population basin organised around the Niger River, connected to those trade meridians through the trans-Saharan trade.

Then developments in Europe changed everything?

Yes, when what I call the “capitalist meridian” emerged on Europe’s Atlantic facade: England, the Low Countries, France, Spain, and Portugal. It created a vertical, centre-periphery structure through conquest and colonial expansion. Initially this really only concerned coastal Africa and South America; the Sahel was in the interior and untouched. But the effect of the capitalist meridian was to destroy many of the trade meridian’s sources of wealth . The regions most exposed were those like the Sahel, whose ties to the trade meridian were already somewhat fragile. I trace a continuous decline of the Sahel from the sixteenth century through to the twentieth.

What does that long history tell us that a more recent account would miss?

The problem with our understanding of Africa today is that we trace everything back to colonialism. Africans do this themselves. Colonialism is really yesterday in the grand chronology of history. For some reason, Africans and Africanists have this fetishism for colonialism, as if millennia of history have no effect on instincts, habits, and modes of thinking. Studying the Songhay Empire is a way to push back against that. The way people think and behave politically and socially in the Sahel owes far more to pre-colonial history than to anything since.

And the Songhay state itself – what does it reveal?

One thing that startles me is how robust it was. It had a real administration, a real bureaucracy and was almost modern in character. And yet this is something entirely absent from today’s Sahel. The reason, I think, is that a part of the administration was staffed by slaves; not slaves in the American antebellum sense, people in social abjection, but people with a slave status who were nonetheless respected and treated well. That status made them so subservient to the royal state that there existed a genuine corps of civil servants – people with the ethics of service, not because they were serving the public for pay, but because they were the king’s men, with all the loyalty that implied.

There was also a sharp distinction between personal property and state property. In the 1530s, a deposed emperor called Muhammad II the Fortunate fled Gao and encountered a royal barge full of goods he himself had sent to be collected. The man on the barge said: “Take what you want, it’s all yours.” The emperor refused, saying that the goods belonged to the Askia, meaning his successor. “I am no longer the Askia. Give me from your own supply, not from the state’s.” I can’t imagine a Sahelian head of state saying that today.

What does the Sahel tell us about states, development, and political economy more broadly?

The Sahel countries don’t really have national economies – that’s the key point. Their economies are regional, integrated into the wider West African and Gulf of Guinea economy. The pillars of any economy – land resources, labour, capital – all come from and flow through that regional system. The Sahel countries within the Gulf of Guinea have a large labour diaspora. Its capital is essentially merchant capital, totally dependent on Gulf of Guinea ports. Its land resources (mining) also need those ports. But at the national level there is a tiny rent economy: fiscal levies, aid money, mining revenues. The economy was originally built, at the time of independence in the 1960s, to extract rent and convert it into development capital. That project failed in the 1970s across much of Africa. What you’re left with is the extraction mechanism without any developmental purpose; just a source of rent for whoever controls the state, while the majority of the population lives within the regional economy and doesn’t depend on the state at all.

The juntas have exploited that gap?

Exactly. As long as the borders stay open and regional trade continues, they don’t need to deliver anything to most of the population. The one genuinely dangerous moment for them was when they left the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). If the Gulf of Guinea countries had closed their borders or restricted trade and labour flows, there would have been real popular fury. There were signs of that as the deadline for withdrawal from ECOWAS approached last January. But thankfully for the juntas, ECOWAS decided to do nothing. So the borders stayed open and nothing changed. The problem now is they’ve also turned against the more urban, formally employed class, that is, the people who interact with the state, who work in or around the NGO sector, which employs a huge proportion of people in the modern economy. The juntas have broken with international aid and shut down thousands of NGOs. What I’m hearing from Niger, for instance, is that people are losing income, contemplating a return to farming, leaving the capital because without their old salaries it’s simply too expensive.