From AFISMA to AES: ECOWAS, Subsidiarity and the Failure to Own Sahel Security, 2012–2026
PhD Candidate, Department of Theory and History of International Relations, RUDN University (Peoples' Friendship University of Russia), Moscow, Russia.
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Review
International Journal of Science and Technology Research Archive, 2026, 11(02), 010–021.
Article DOI: 10.53771/ijstra.2026.11.2.0036
Publication history:
Received on 20 August 2026; revised on 02 October 2026; accepted on 05 October 2026
Abstract:
When the withdrawal of Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) took legal effect on 29 January 2025, the Community lost the three states whose insecurity had dominated its agenda for more than a decade. This article asks how the regional organisation with the continent's most developed conflict-management architecture came to be a bystander to the Sahel's security crisis. Drawing on the principle of subsidiarity within the African Peace and Security Architecture (APSA) and on a four-part conception of ownership — who authorises, who pays, who commands, who bears the consequences — we trace the arc from the African-led International Support Mission in Mali (AFISMA, 2012–2013) to the Alliance of Sahel States (AES, 2023–2026). We argue that ECOWAS never owned Sahel security. The security file leaked upward to the United Nations and the African Union, outward to France, the European Union and later Russia, sideways to the G5 Sahel, and finally downward to the affected states themselves. The Community's instruments — mediation and sanctions built for constitutional crises — were mobilised repeatedly, but the counter-insurgency core of the crisis was consistently left to others. The Niger crisis of 2023 exposed the resulting gap between declaratory authority and operational capacity, and the AES emerged as a rival claim to subsidiarity from below. Critically, the AES's own attempt at ownership — formalized in the Unified Force inaugurated in December 2025 — has not arrested the violence: Islamist fatalities in the three states reached record levels in 2025–2026, validating the argument that the underlying problem is the chronic mismatch between security governance ambitions and operational capacity, not merely the identity of the responsible institution. We conclude that the failure to own security, more than any single sanctions decision, explains the rupture — and that the AES's security record since January 2025 offers a sobering postscript.
Keywords:
ECOWAS; subsidiarity; African Peace and Security Architecture; AFISMA; G5 Sahel; Alliance of Sahel States; Mali; Niger; Burkina Faso; regional security governance; Sahel insurgency
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