The Sahel Coup Belt as a Counter-hegemonic Bloc: The Alliance of Sahel States (AES), Sovereigntism and the Unmaking of the ECOWAS Liberal Order

Abstract

The withdrawal of Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) in January 2025 and their consolidation under the Confederation of Sahel States (AES) mark a doctrinal rupture rather than a transient security crisis. This article advances the argument that the AES constitutes the first organised post-colonial sovereigntist project in West Africa, distinguished from earlier pan-Africanist initiatives by its institutional density, ideological coherence and material commitments. Drawing on Amitav Acharya’s conception of the multiplex world, Mohammed Ayoob’s subaltern realism and the wider literature on post-liberal regional order, the article re-reads the Sahelian rupture as a structural answer to the exhausted compact between regional liberalism and external dependency that ECOWAS embodied. Through a layered analysis of the Charter of Liptako–Gourma, the contested CFA franc question, the diversification of security partnerships beyond France and the reception of Russian, Turkish, Emirati and Iranian actors, the article proposes the concept of embedded sovereigntism as a hybrid mode of statecraft that rejects autarky while refusing dependence. The claim is deliberately narrow. Sovereigntist doctrine yields bargaining power where a partner’s contribution is substitutable, where no single choke point exists, and where the state can administer the terms it extracts: conditions the extractive sector satisfies and the security sector does not. It is tested against conduct rather than communiqués—revised mining codes, the nationalisations of 2024–25 and the confederal levy of March 2025—and qualified throughout by the autocratic consolidation that has accompanied it. The implications are continental: the polycentric West African order now in formation may prefigure the wider African pivot of a multipolar century.