There may be a contagion effect, too, in which one coup provides a permission structure for the next, though as Singh notes, historically juntas have operated less according to external logic than internal motivation. And while many American commentators blame the end of a Pax Americana and a resulting vacuum of geopolitical leadership, those closer to the Sahel tend to see the American war on terrorism, particularly the U.S.-led invasion of Libya in 2011, as a major contributor to regional instability. On the ground, animosity toward the French is also pervasive, and there is influence jockeying and obvious strategic meddling by the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar, along with widespread suspicion about Russia (with its state-funded military contractor the Wagner group recently rebranding on the continent).
The past few years have been especially difficult ones across the Sahel, with the pandemic and Covid recessions and a surge in hunger partly driven by the war in Ukraine. Public revenues have fallen, countries are struggling through sovereign debt crises, and inflation has been soaring. Islamist militants, now largely forgotten or ignored by civilians in the United States, continue to be a source of Sahelian instability, with the failure to contain them in certain countries widely seen as an indictment of existing elites. There are generational dynamics at play, too, with booming youth populations increasingly frustrated with older leadership regimes and demographic ones as well, with rapid and disorderly urbanization from an increasingly harsh and conflict-ridden agricultural countryside.
I think it’s also worth flagging another possible contributor: climate change.
Climate researchers have long projected that the Sahel would be one of the regions most threatened by the impacts of warming. The Institute for Economics and Peace has identified the Sahel as one of its ecological threat hot spots, and according to Notre Dame’s Global Adaptation Initiative’s index, all six countries in the region rank among the least prepared places in the world. Writing for the Council on Foreign Relations in 2022, Beza Tesfaye noted that “Sahelian countries are simultaneously among the most affected by climate change and the least prepared to adapt,” an observation underlined last year by the I.M.F. as well. And in November 2022 the United Nations warned that climate impacts could bring about political instability and further conflict in 10 nations of the greater Sahel. In the last five years, those 10 nations have experienced a total of eight attempted or successful coups.
Across the region, environmental struggle has profoundly shaped a half-century of history, but the recent disruptions are nevertheless significant. In Niger, there have been nine droughts and five major flooding events in the last 20 years, with food crises every four years and many parts of the country without a good harvest in a decade. In 2022, an intense rainy season produced devastating flooding in Mali and Chad, events the World Weather Attribution network estimated were made 80 times more likely by climate change. Southeast of the coup belt, a three-year drought in the Horn of Africa has left more than four million people in need of humanitarian assistance; according to the W.W.A.’s “conservative estimate,” the drought was made 100 times more likely by climate change.
These disasters aren’t the source of all of the recent political turmoil. As in many unstable parts of the world, climate change may not be directly causing political disruptions, but it is pressuring already fragile systems. “The patient, as it were, is suffering from lots of different kinds of ailments,” the political scientist Kenneth Schultz told me. “But this is another one.” Last August, Roland Ngam, of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, wrote in South Africa’s Daily Maverick that “behind all the coups” are “weak institutions and especially climate change which has caused a massive ecosystem collapse over the last century.” And in November Abdoulie Ceesay, the deputy majority leader of the Gambian National Assembly, wrote in The New Internationalist: “The simple fact is that the rise of militarism has gone hand in hand with the rise in poverty, food insecurity, economic crises and extreme weather. His conclusion: “To belittle the role of climate change in these crises seems to me obscene.”