The AES Sahel Experiment Two Years On: Sovereignty, Substitution and the Limits of Rupture

The creation of the AES was not a single event but a methodical sequence of institutional engineering. The process began with the Liptako-Gourma Charter in September 2023, a mutual defence pact that formed the security foundation of the alliance. This was followed by a confederation treaty in July 2024 and the formal establishment of the confederation the following January. These political milestones were quickly substantiated with tangible, shared institutions. By March 2026, analysts at the Institute for Security Studies (ISS Africa) were examining the operational launch of the AES Unified Force, a 6,000-troop joint contingent headquartered in Niamey which had been formally inaugurated on December 20, 2025. This force is the hard-power expression of the alliance’s founding principle: collective security against persistent insurgent threats.

Parallel to the security architecture, the member states moved to construct a shared economic framework, designed to foster self-reliance and fund their new ambitions. On December 23, 2025, the Banque de Coopération et d’Investissement pour le Développement de l'AES (BCID-AES) was launched in Bamako. With an initial capitalization of 500 billion CFA francs, as reported by the Ecofin Agency, the bank is intended to finance development projects and reduce dependence on external financial institutions like the IMF and the World Bank. The entire apparatus is funded internally, primarily through an innovative levy. An agreement on March 28, 2025, established a 0.5 per cent tax on all imports destined for the member states, a mechanism ISS Africa noted was supplemented by national solidarity funds within each country.

These structural moves were accompanied by powerful symbols of integration. As reported by Peoples Dispatch in December 2025, the introduction of a joint AES passport was a clear step toward cultivating a shared identity among their populations, moving the project beyond a simple alliance of regimes into a confederation of peoples. This rapid institution-building signals a clear, long term vision. The leaders of the AES are not merely managing a crisis; they are attempting to build a durable state structure capable of surviving in a hostile environment.

The decision to formally complete the withdrawal from ECOWAS on January 29, 2025, was the defining act of the AES's creation. The move, chronicled in a Security Council Report from November 2025, represented the severing of a forty-nine-year-old relationship that had defined the political and economic landscape of West Africa. In leaving the regional bloc, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger were consciously exiting a framework that, for all its political disagreements, provided a common market, a customs union, and a zone of free movement for people and goods. This was a strategic trade-off: in exchange for absolute policy autonomy and freedom from ECOWAS sanctions, the AES countries sacrificed guaranteed, tariff-free access to the region’s largest coastal economies.

This disengagement was not limited to the regional African sphere. In a move that underlined the ideological underpinnings of its new foreign policy, Mali’s transitional government withdrew from the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie on March 17, 2025. This step signaled a broader pivot away from historical post-colonial structures and a rejection of the political and cultural influence of France. The confederation’s assertive stance has been met with a hardening of policies from traditional Western partners. The United States government, for its part, expanded its travel ban on officials and associated individuals from the three nations, effective January 1, 2026. The AES governments responded with reciprocal restrictions, formalizing a diplomatic chill that has profound implications for investment, aid, and security cooperation.

Leaving these established frameworks creates a vacuum that the new AES institutions must now fill. The departure from ECOWAS terminates access to its trade facilitation programs and dispute resolution mechanisms. The estrangement from Western partners curtails access to critical intelligence and military support that, for years, supplemented national efforts against insurgents. The leaders of the AES have calculated that the benefits of unconstrained sovereignty outweigh these losses. The coming years will test that calculation, proving whether their new, self-funded institutions can replicate or replace the web of support, however imperfect, that they chose to leave behind.

The AES is a contiguous landmass, but it is also a geographic island. For all its political and military consolidation, the confederation remains fundamentally landlocked. Its economic survival is tethered to a handful of road and rail corridors that run through neighbouring coastal states to the ports of Dakar, Abidjan, Lomé, Cotonou, and Tema. This geographical reality is the project’s central, unalterable vulnerability. This was demonstrated with stark clarity in September 2025 when militants from the Jama'at Nasr al-Islam wal Muslimin (JNIM) initiated a blockade of the Dakar-Bamako corridor, the primary artery for goods entering Mali.

The incident, which choked off supplies and sent immediate price shocks through the Malian economy, served as a real-world stress test of the AES’s resilience. A December 2025 analysis from the Policy Center for the New South meticulously detailed how the blockade exposed the confederation’s extreme supply chain concentration risk. A single non-state actor, through targeted action on one stretch of road, was able to exert strategic-level economic pressure on a sovereign state. The event demonstrated that the most significant threat to the AES may not be a conventional military invasion but the slow strangulation of its economic lifelines.

This dependency creates a series of paradoxes. The 0.5 percent import levy that funds the confederation’s budget is collected at the very coastal ports that lie outside its control, making its financial autonomy dependent on the administrative cooperation of its neighbours. The push for economic self-sufficiency is thus paradoxically financed by a structure of profound external dependence. Furthermore, these corridors are not just vulnerable to insurgent action. They are also subject to the political whims of the transit countries, who could, in a future dispute, close their borders or impose punitive tariffs, creating a similar economic shock. The quest for sovereignty has led the AES into a logistics trap, where its ability to function is held hostage by insecure highways and the goodwill of its neighbours.

The raison d'être of the Alliance of Sahel States is collective security. The mutual defence pact was forged in the crucible of a shared, escalating conflict against violent extremist groups that operate fluidly across the porous borders of the Liptako-Gourma region. The creation of the 6,000-soldier joint force, headquartered in Niamey, is the most muscular expression of this commitment. The stated goal is to pool resources and coordinate operations to reclaim territory and protect citizens from groups like JNIM and the Islamic State. Yet the structure of this conflict presents a deep and difficult paradox for the new confederation.

The insurgency is both the justification for the AES’s existence and the most acute threat to its viability. The September 2025 blockade of the Bamako corridor illustrates a tactical pivot by these groups, away from solely targeting state security forces and toward attacking critical economic infrastructure. For an insurgent group, shutting down a highway is a low-cost, high-impact operation. It requires far fewer resources than storming a military base but can inflict disproportionate damage on the state's economy and legitimacy. This forces a strategic dilemma upon the new AES Unified Force command. With a limited number of troops to cover a vast and sparsely populated territory, it must prioritize its missions.

Does the force focus on clearing and holding remote rural areas where insurgents are embedded? Does it concentrate on protecting major population centers from attack? Or does it reorient its posture to become primarily a route-protection force, securing the hundreds of kilometers of highway that constitute the confederation’s economic lifelines? A force of 6,000 soldiers cannot effectively do all three simultaneously across a territory spanning more than 2.7 million square kilometers. This insurgency paradox means that military successes in one domain, such as clearing a militant stronghold in the hinterlands, may come at the cost of leaving a vital economic corridor vulnerable. The very enemy that brought the AES together has found its structural weak point, turning the confederation's landlocked geography into a weapon against it.

The arid landscapes of the Sahel conceal the material basis for the AES's ambitious political project: significant mineral wealth. Niger is a globally important producer of uranium. Mali and Burkina Faso possess substantial gold mining sectors. These resources are the primary source of the foreign currency required to pay for imports, fund the new joint military force, and capitalize the BCID-AES development bank. Control over this mineral revenue is therefore not just an economic priority; it is a matter of state survival for the confederation. The entire architecture of sovereignty being built by the AES ultimately rests on the ability to extract these resources and export them to global markets.

This reality places the logistics trap in even sharper relief. The security of mine sites themselves is a major challenge, but the greater vulnerability lies in the long and exposed supply chains required to operate them. Heavy equipment, fuel, and specialized chemicals must be imported via the same corridors from coastal ports, and the extracted minerals must then travel the same routes in reverse to be exported. A disruption along the Dakar-Bamako or Lomé-Ouagadougou corridors does not just mean empty shelves in city markets; it means mining operations can grind to a halt, cutting off the flow of cash that the states depend on.

The confederation’s pivot away from traditional Western security and economic partners has occurred in parallel with a search for new allies who may be more aligned with its political model. This has introduced a degree of strategic ambiguity regarding long-term partnerships for investment and infrastructure development. While the extension of transitional mandates, such as General Tchiani's roadmap to 2030 in Niger, provides a veneer of political predictability, it creates underlying uncertainty for international investors. These firms typically prioritize stable, predictable legal and regulatory frameworks over the personalized authority of any single leader. The success of the AES will depend on its ability to navigate this tension, securing the external investment needed to develop its economy without compromising its core principle of political sovereignty.

The Alliance of Sahel States is a serious and consequential undertaking. In a very short time, its leaders have translated political vision into a concrete institutional reality, with a functioning confederation, a joint military force, and a regional development bank. These are not the actions of regimes merely seeking short-term survival but of state-builders engaged in a foundational project to erect a new center of power in West Africa. The internal coherence and velocity of the AES project have been established beyond doubt. The critical question, however, remains external and logistical. The fate of the confederation will likely be decided not in its capital cities but along the fragile transport corridors that connect it to the outside world.

The sovereignty that the AES seeks is politically absolute but physically conditional. The states have achieved freedom from the strictures of ECOWAS and the influence of former colonial powers, but they have not achieved freedom from geography. Their landlocked reality imposes a permanent dependency that no treaty or levy can eliminate. The JNIM blockade of September 2025 was a demonstration of this principle. It showed that the military and economic security of the confederation are inextricably linked and that a non-state actor can hold the viability of the entire project at risk by controlling a few key chokepoints. For the 72 million inhabitants of the AES, the grand ambition of sovereignty may ultimately depend on the security of a single road.

Assessing this new geopolitical entity requires a framework that moves beyond traditional political risk analysis. The interlocking challenges of governance, security, and logistics demand a more integrated approach to understanding sovereign capability. For institutional investors, multilateral organizations, and corporations operating in or adjacent to the region, mapping these complex vulnerabilities is essential for maintaining operational resilience. The Cabier Sovereign Risk Framework offers a precise methodology for linking these complex governance and compliance terms to the granular, on-the-ground operational realities that will determine the future of the Sahel.