BLOG POST | 26 Feb 2026
From stabilisation to navigation
What the Sahel reveals about engaging with conflict in a multipolar world
This blog explores how the Sahel’s evolving conflicts expose the limits of security first interventions and argues for a shift in conflict engagement.
By Antje Herrberg, Véronique Dudouet
Global political debate is increasingly framed through the language of multipolarity and strategic recalibration. In this landscape, the Sahel has receded from the centre of international attention, as if its turbulence and jihadist threat belonged to a previous cycle of intervention.
This perception is misleading. Armed violence has not declined, governance fragilities remain acute, regional alignments continue to shift, and social fabrics in countries such as Niger and Mali are under sustained strain. What has faded is not the Sahel’s relevance, but the intensity of external focus. This disengagement exposes deeper limitations in how conflict engagement has been conceptualised over the past two decades.
The limits of the security-first paradigm
International engagement in the Sahel has long followed a security-first paradigm: containing armed groups, restoring territorial control, and professionalising security forces before broadening governance and development efforts.
This approach rested on a flawed assumption: that authority operates hierarchically and can be consolidated vertically. Conflict intervention thus became a largely technical exercise focused on identifiable elites within recognisable chains of command, premised on the idea that strengthening the apex of the state would allow stability to cascade downwards.
Evidence from Niger challenges this logic. As documented in our new report, “Cultural blind spots in conflict resolution in Niger and the Sahel“, authority is not monopolised by a single institutional centre. Instead, it is negotiated across customary, religious, social, and state actors. Legitimacy circulates relationally, and political order emerges from overlapping sites of authority rather than from a clearly defined apex.
Community leaders described peacebuilding as a communicative and relational process in which speech, ritual, silence, and informal mediation form critical infrastructures of order within a heterarchical political landscape.
In such settings, reinforcing one node of authority does not automatically consolidate stability. It may instead unsettle other nodes and displace tensions elsewhere. The resulting oscillation between securitisation and withdrawal reflects a deeper structural misalignment between external intervention models and local political realities.
Armed groups and heterarchical legitimacy
Jihadist and other armed groups have adapted more effectively to these heterarchical realities. In parts of Mali and Niger, they embed themselves within local grievance structures, negotiate selectively with customary and community authorities, and offer immediate – if coercive – forms of order and protection. These practices can outcompete abstract promises of governance reform, particularly where Western-backed interventions are perceived as distant or dismissive of local dignity and sovereignty. Armed groups thus draw legitimacy not only from ideology or force, but also from the limitations and blind spots of external engagement itself.
A debate stuck in hierarchy
A town hall discussion on the Sahel at the Munich Security Conference in February 2026 illustrated this conceptual impasse. Panellists, who did not include any speaker from the Sahel, acknowledged failures in counterterrorism policy and persistent governance deficits, while calling for renewed political engagement and socio-economic resilience. Yet the gravitational centre of the debate remained security, framed primarily through sequencing, state consolidation, and geopolitical competition.
What remained largely implicit was the heterarchical nature of authority within Sahelian societies. Governance was discussed as institutional repair, legitimacy as something to be restored through reform. The relational infrastructures that sustain order in practice remained largely under-theorised and insufficiently reflected at the town hall, as it does in overall policy discussions.
Beyond the “demise” narrative
Some observers, in a recent article on “The Demise of Conflict Studies,” argue that conflict studies itself is in decline as Western leverage erodes. However, local voices from Niger suggest a different conclusion. The problem is not the irrelevance of conflict research, but the persistence of an analytical grammar calibrated for hierarchical political orders.
The Sahel does not signal the demise of conflict engagement. Rather, it reveals the limits of stabilisation conceived primarily as vertical consolidation.
These insights extend beyond the region. The international system itself is becoming increasingly heterarchical, with authority dispersed across states, regional blocs, non-state actors, and competing normative frameworks. Multipolarity is not merely a redistribution of power, it also complicates how legitimacy is recognised, negotiated, and contested.
In such a landscape, conflict engagement must shift from stabilisation to navigation. Navigation means mapping overlapping authorities, investing in relational infrastructures, and recognising that legitimacy cannot be engineered solely through institutional reinforcement. Cultural literacy is not a soft add-on, but a structural competence. Security cannot precede legitimacy. It must be embedded within it.
The Sahel has not left the stage of international security. Rather, it has anticipated the conditions under which future conflict engagement is likely to unfold. The question is not whether to re-engage, but whether engagement itself will be conceptualised differently, beyond the familiar rhetoric of “pragmatism” or “true partnership.”
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