ECOWAS After the Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso Withdrawal: The Sahel Confederation's First Year

The Alliance of Sahel States, known by its French acronym AES, was constituted as a defense pact in September 2023 in response to ECOWAS threats of military intervention following the July 2023 coup in Niger. By January 2024, the three military governments had announced their formal withdrawal from ECOWAS. By July 2024, the Niamey Confederal Treaty had transformed the alliance into a formal confederation with a rotating presidency, a confederal parliament, and a defense and security architecture explicitly distinct from ECOWAS structures.

ECOWAS's response has been managed retreat. The bloc rescinded its sanctions on Niger in February 2024, reopened borders, and through 2024 and 2025 attempted to maintain trade and free movement arrangements with the three withdrawing states. The formal exit took effect in January 2025 after the one-year notice period prescribed by the ECOWAS Revised Treaty. By mid-2025, transitional arrangements had been agreed covering customs, movement of persons, and the ECO regional currency project, but the structural reality is that ECOWAS now operates as a twelve-member bloc with substantially diminished geographic coverage and political weight.

The strategic drivers of the rupture are several and overlapping. The first is the failure of the post-2013 French military presence — Operation Serval succeeded by Operation Barkhane, and the European Takuba task force — to contain the spread of jihadist insurgency from northern Mali to the broader Sahel. The geographic expansion of armed group activity into central Mali, western Niger, eastern Burkina Faso, and increasingly into littoral states (Benin, Togo, Ghana, Côte d'Ivoire) was the defining political failure of the 2015–2022 period and the principal popular grievance that legitimized the successive coups.

The second is the broader anti-French sentiment that crystallized across francophone West Africa during the same period, fueled by perceptions of neocolonial monetary arrangements (the CFA franc), unequal trade relationships, and military presence that did not deliver security. The withdrawal of French forces from Mali in 2022, Burkina Faso in 2023, and Niger in 2024 marked the end of a continuous French military presence in the Sahel that had effectively persisted since independence.

The third is the substitution effect provided by Russia. The Wagner Group's transformation into the Africa Corps under direct Russian Ministry of Defense control following Prigozhin's death in 2023 has institutionalized a Russian security partnership across the AES states. Estimates place Russian deployed personnel at approximately 4,000 across the three countries by late 2025, with primary missions in regime protection, training, and counterinsurgency support. The operational record is mixed: Russian-supported offensives have retaken some district capitals but have been accompanied by documented atrocities, particularly the Moura events in Mali and incidents in eastern Burkina Faso, which have generated additional grievances rather than reducing insurgent recruitment.

The economic dimension is consequential. The CFA franc question, which had been a focal point of public debate, has not yet produced concrete monetary policy shifts. The AES states remain inside the West African Monetary Union (UEMOA) and continue to use the CFA franc pegged to the euro. Proposals for an AES common currency have been circulated but not operationalized. Trade flows have been disrupted but not catastrophically: ECOWAS data indicate that intra-regional trade involving the AES states declined approximately 18 percent in 2024 before partially recovering in 2025 under transitional arrangements.

Mining is the strategic prize. Niger holds the world's seventh-largest uranium reserves, Mali is among the largest African gold producers, and Burkina Faso has substantial gold and zinc resources. Orano's Niger uranium operations have been effectively suspended since the 2023 coup, and the SOMAÏR concession has been formally revoked. Russian and Chinese state-linked entities have signed exploration agreements across all three states, though actual production transitions are slower than political announcements suggest. The European supply chain implications — particularly for nuclear fuel cycles — are not yet acute but are non-trivial.

The security trajectory is deteriorating. The Armed Conflict Location and Event Data project recorded approximately 11,200 fatalities from political violence across the three AES states in 2025, up from 8,900 in 2023. JNIM (the Al-Qaeda-affiliated Group for the Support of Islam and Muslims) and Islamic State Sahel Province have both expanded territorial influence, particularly in the tri-border region between Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger. Civilian displacement exceeded 3.1 million across the three states by end-2025.

The implications for coastal West Africa are substantial. Spillover incidents in northern Benin, Togo, Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire have increased measurably. The Accra Initiative, designed in 2017 as a coordination mechanism among littoral states, has been reactivated but remains under-resourced. ECOWAS's standby force has not been formally deployed, and the political appetite for kinetic intervention is low after the Niger experience demonstrated the limits of credible threat-making.

The international response has been fragmented. The United States designated the July 2023 Niger events a coup approximately seven months after the fact, terminating most assistance under Section 7008 of the foreign appropriations act, but maintained the drone base at Agadez until evicted in 2024. The European Union suspended budget support but has continued limited humanitarian and migration cooperation. China has expanded commercial relationships, particularly in infrastructure and mining, while maintaining formal neutrality on governance questions. Türkiye has emerged as a notable defense supplier, particularly through Bayraktar drones.

For multinational firms with operations in West Africa, three practical implications follow. First, expatriate security in the AES states should be treated as comparable to high-risk environments such as Libya or northeastern Nigeria; insurance markets are pricing accordingly. Second, contractual counterparty risk has increased significantly: nationalizations and concession revocations are politically available instruments and have been used. Third, the coastal states — particularly Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana and Senegal — represent a more stable operating environment but are increasingly exposed to spillover security risk that requires explicit modeling in country-risk frameworks.

Veritas Global Advisory's Africa Watch will track the AES confederation's evolution, the security trajectory in the Sahel and littoral states, and the trajectory of strategic mining concessions in our quarterly West Africa Risk Briefing. The next edition will assess Senegal's transition under President Bassirou Diomaye Faye and its implications for the future of the CFA franc arrangement.