The Franchise That Governs: Why the Sahel's Jihadists Are Building States While Africa's States Collapse
The Sahel has become the world's deadliest region for terrorism, accounting for half of global terror deaths. But the real story is not violence—it is governance. Jihadist groups now tax, adjudicate, and administer territories that nominal states cannot reach. As this parallel order expands...
The Franchise That Governs
Somewhere in the scrublands of northern Burkina Faso, a tax collector arrives at an artisanal gold mine. He is not a government official. He represents Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin, al-Qaeda’s Sahelian affiliate. He levies a fee—roughly 10-15% of production—issues a receipt of sorts, and guarantees safe passage for the gold traders who will move the ore south toward coastal markets. The transaction is orderly. It has been orderly for years.
This scene captures something that Western security frameworks struggle to process: the Sahel’s jihadist insurgency has evolved beyond terrorism into governance. The groups that now control swathes of Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger are not merely destroying states. They are replacing them—providing courts, collecting taxes, mediating disputes, and offering a brutal but predictable order that weak central governments cannot match. The question is no longer whether the Sahel can be stabilized. It is whether the coastal states of West Africa can survive what comes next.
The Architecture of Collapse
The standard explanation for Sahelian instability runs something like this: the 2011 Libyan collapse flooded the region with weapons, France’s 2013 intervention scattered jihadists rather than defeating them, and a cascade of coups since 2020 has expelled Western forces while inviting Russian mercenaries who make things worse. Each element is true. None captures the structural dynamic.
The deeper problem is that Sahelian states were never designed to govern their territories. Colonial fiscal systems extracted resources from coastal ports and navigable rivers; the vast interior was administered through indirect rule that left traditional authorities in place. Post-independence governments inherited borders that enclosed populations they could not tax, territories they could not patrol, and economies they could not formalize. A 2023 UNODC assessment documented how Libya became a source of newly manufactured weapons flowing into northern Mali—but the weapons found fertile ground because the state had never truly arrived.
What jihadist groups discovered, beginning with the 2012 Mali crisis, was that this governance vacuum could be filled. Not through spectacular attacks, but through patient institution-building. JNIM now controls or contests nearly half of Burkina Faso’s territory. In areas under its influence, it operates what amounts to a parallel state: sharia courts adjudicate disputes faster than government courts ever did; zakat collection creates fiscal contracts with populations; and crucially, the group mediates the farmer-herder conflicts over land and water that the state had allowed to fester into communal violence.
The mathematics are instructive but not deterministic. Burkina Faso’s government controls perhaps 40% of its national territory. Mali’s writ extends little beyond Bamako and a few regional capitals. Niger’s junta, despite Russian backing, faces an insurgency that has only accelerated since the 2023 coup. Yet these percentages obscure the more important shift: populations in contested zones increasingly experience jihadist governance as more legitimate than the absent state.
This is not Stockholm syndrome. It is a rational calculation. When a village faces a choice between a corrupt government official who arrives sporadically to extract bribes and a jihadist commander who offers predictable taxation and functioning dispute resolution, the choice is not ideological. It is practical.
The Franchise Model
Understanding JNIM requires abandoning the mental model of a terrorist organization. It operates as a franchise system—al-Qaeda provides the brand, the legitimacy, and occasional strategic guidance, while constituent groups maintain operational autonomy and pursue local agendas.
Katibat Macina, led by Amadou Kouffa, has successfully nested a majority-Fulani ethnic militia within JNIM’s Salafi-jihadist framework. The Africa Center for Strategic Studies notes that the group weaponizes genuine Fulani grievances—decades of marginalization, dispossession from traditional grazing lands, and communal violence—for broader jihadist ends. This creates a franchise quality-control problem that al-Qaeda’s central leadership cannot solve: local affiliates pursue ethno-nationalist objectives under the jihadist brand, diluting ideological coherence while expanding territorial reach.
The result is an organization that is simultaneously weaker and stronger than it appears. Weaker because it lacks centralized command and control. Stronger because it has achieved something no purely terrorist organization can: local legitimacy rooted in service provision.
Islamic State’s Sahel Province operates differently—more brutal, less interested in governance, focused on territorial conquest rather than population management. The two groups cooperated until 2020 despite their parent organizations’ global war, revealing that local dynamics override centrally-scripted ideological conflicts. They now compete violently, but this competition has not weakened the overall insurgency. It has intensified pressure on states that must fight multiple enemies simultaneously.
The Junta Gambit
Mali’s Assimi Goïta, Burkina Faso’s Ibrahim Traoré, and Niger’s Abdourahamane Tchiani share more than military backgrounds. They share a theory of sovereignty: that Western partnerships—French military bases, ECOWAS economic integration, CFA franc monetary union—represent neocolonial constraints that prevent effective counterinsurgency.
The theory has been tested. In January 2024, the three juntas announced their withdrawal from ECOWAS and formed the Alliance of Sahel States. They expelled French forces. They terminated the UN peacekeeping mission in Mali. They invited Russian military contractors—first Wagner, now the reorganized Africa Corps—to fill the security vacuum.
The results are not encouraging. Mali and Burkina Faso control less territory today than before Russian deployment. The transition from Wagner’s autonomous mercenary structure to Africa Corps’ state-controlled model created what might be called an immunocompromised period—organizational restructuring degraded counterinsurgency effectiveness precisely when insurgent pressure intensified.
More troubling is the strategic logic. AES treats monetary sovereignty as a prerequisite for military sovereignty, but the temporal sequence creates vulnerability: exiting French security architecture happens before indigenous capacity matures. The juntas have achieved rapid decision-making by eliminating coordination requirements and external oversight. They have also destroyed institutional memory. The G5 Sahel framework, despite its failures, had accumulated a decade of intelligence networks, population mapping, and tribal liaison relationships. The 5,000-person AES joint force represents a restart from zero.
The juntas’ domestic legitimacy rests on anti-French nationalism and promises of security improvements. Neither can be sustained indefinitely. Traoré’s revolutionary rhetoric requires visible victories; Goïta’s pragmatism requires demonstrable results; Tchiani’s personalist control requires continued crisis to justify emergency measures. All three have extended their “transitions” indefinitely—a governance mode that paradoxically strengthens external sovereignty performance while preventing domestic accountability.
The Southward Drift
Violence does not respect borders. It follows opportunity.
The coastal states of West Africa—Benin, Togo, Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire—have spent decades as relative success stories: stable, growing, increasingly integrated into global markets. That era is ending. According to the Soufan Center, Benin experienced 166 attacks in 2023. Togo recorded 14 attacks killing 66 people. Ghana has avoided major incidents but serves as a logistical base for jihadist procurement networks.
The spillover follows predictable patterns. JNIM’s expansion into Benin tracks the exact geographic corridors that artisanal gold smuggling routes use to reach coastal export hubs. The group is not expanding randomly. It is systematically securing control of supply chains from mine-mouth to coastal port, transforming from local taxation to vertically integrated commodity trading.
Conservation infrastructure designed for ecological connectivity is being exploited as governance vacuum infrastructure. The W-Arly-Pendjari Complex—a massive transboundary park system spanning Benin, Burkina Faso, and Niger—creates zones where state presence is deliberately minimized for environmental reasons. Jihadists have converted these spaces into operational sanctuaries.
The humanitarian imperative to concentrate refugee populations in northern regions of coastal states has inadvertently created geographically bounded clusters where displaced populations from Burkina Faso and Mali—carrying conflict experience, trauma, and in some cases, armed group connections—become accessible to recruitment networks. UNHCR documents that approximately 3.8 million people remain forcibly displaced in the Sahel region, with one in eight having been displaced multiple times.
Côte d’Ivoire’s authoritarian capacity to deploy enhanced security measures has created a routing effect: jihadist groups bypass the hardened target and concentrate on neighboring states with weaker security apparatuses. Togo and Benin absorb pressure that Côte d’Ivoire deflects. Regional security becomes a game of displacement rather than elimination.
The Illicit Substrate
Follow the money and you find a system more sophisticated than the states it parasitizes.
Gold is the primary revenue source. Artisanal mining sites across the Sahel produce billions of dollars annually, much of it untaxed by formal governments. Jihadist groups have inserted themselves as regulators—taxing production, guaranteeing safe passage, and in some cases, operating mines directly. The same industrial mining infrastructure that feeds coastal GDP growth creates dual-use supply chains that jihadist groups exploit for IED production: explosives diverted from legal mining operations become weapons.
Drug trafficking provides additional revenue. Cocaine from Latin America transits through the Sahel en route to European markets; the region has become a waystation rather than a destination, but transit fees accumulate. The UNODC threat assessment documents how these flows interweave with weapons trafficking, creating integrated criminal-insurgent economies.
The financial architecture is elegant in its resilience. Western sanctions on formal banking have paradoxically strengthened informal systems. Hawala networks—trust-based value transfer systems dating to medieval Islamic commerce—have fused with mobile money platforms to create hybrid financial infrastructure that operates outside regulatory visibility. Each increment of formal port security increases the market value of smuggling corridors by raising the cost of legitimate passage.
The endpoint is coastal real estate. Illicit economies are not merely flowing south as violence spillover—they are being transformed into permanent urban infrastructure through property investment. The architectural skyline of Abidjan and Accra becomes the final storage medium for conflict capital.
What Breaks First
Current trajectories lead somewhere specific. The question is what fails before intervention becomes possible.
The demographic pressure is relentless. Sixty-five percent of the Sahelian population is under 25. Niger’s fertility rate exceeds seven children per woman. The Population Reference Bureau documents youth bulges that will double populations within a generation. When the adult decision-making cohort has no lived experience of stable governance, you cannot transition back to a baseline that exists only in institutional memory.
Climate stress compounds every other pressure. The Sahel is warming 1.5 times faster than the global average. Drought cycles that once occurred every decade now arrive every few years. Lake Chad has lost 90% of its surface area since the 1960s. Farmer-herder conflicts over shrinking arable land provide the immediate grievances that jihadist recruitment exploits.
Education systems have collapsed in contested zones. UNICEF reports that over 11,100 schools in the Sahel region have closed due to conflict or threats. When jihadist groups systematically close schools through violence, they eliminate the state’s primary claim to structuring childhood development. The vacuum creates conditions where armed groups become default vocational infrastructure—the only institutions offering young people structure, purpose, and income.
The coastal states face a choice they have not yet acknowledged. Ghana’s deliberate positioning as a stable, business-friendly gateway to the Sahel—exemplified by Tema port’s billion-dollar expansion—creates the precise infrastructure that jihadist procurement networks exploit. Low-scrutiny trade channels designed to facilitate commerce also facilitate weapons acquisition. The developmental logic and the security logic point in opposite directions.
The Narrow Path
Solutions exist. None are easy. All require trade-offs that current political configurations make nearly impossible.
The first intervention point is economic integration that bypasses the juntas. ECOWAS has lost its Sahelian members, but coastal states retain leverage over the landlocked interior. Transport costs in the Sahel consume 60% of goods prices compared to 10-15% for coastal nations. Any additional risk premium—jihadist taxes, militia checkpoints, maritime piracy—compounds multiplicatively. Coastal states could offer preferential trade terms to Sahelian populations directly, undermining jihadist economic governance by providing better alternatives. The trade-off: this requires accepting that the juntas will remain in power while working around them, abandoning the fiction that democratic restoration is imminent.
The second intervention point is intelligence cooperation that survives political ruptures. The Accra Initiative—bringing together Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, and Togo—was designed for exactly this purpose. Burkina Faso’s withdrawal has crippled it. What remains possible is bilateral arrangements between coastal states and whatever local authorities actually control Sahelian territory, including traditional leaders and even pragmatic elements within jihadist structures. The trade-off: this means engaging with actors whose legitimacy is contested and whose methods are often brutal.
The third intervention point is demographic investment at scale. The Sahel’s youth bulge is a 20-year problem that requires 20-year solutions: education systems, vocational training, labor mobility agreements with Europe and the Gulf. Current aid flows are inadequate by an order of magnitude. The trade-off: this requires donor commitments that survive multiple electoral cycles in contributing countries, a form of patience that democratic politics rarely sustains.
The most likely scenario is none of these. The most likely scenario is continued drift: coastal states hardening their northern borders, Sahelian populations enduring jihadist governance, and the international community issuing statements of concern while avoiding commitments that might fail visibly. The Sahel will not collapse dramatically. It will settle into a new equilibrium—violent, impoverished, and ungoverned by any authority that answers to its population.
The Questions That Remain
Q: Are jihadist groups in the Sahel connected to global terrorist networks planning attacks on the West? JNIM and Islamic State Sahel Province maintain ideological ties to al-Qaeda and ISIS respectively, but their operational focus is overwhelmingly local. Western intelligence agencies monitor for external plotting, but the primary threat is regional destabilization rather than transcontinental terrorism.
Q: Why did France’s military intervention fail? Operation Barkhane succeeded tactically—killing jihadist leaders, disrupting networks—but failed strategically because military pressure without governance improvement simply displaced insurgents rather than defeating them. The intervention also generated nationalist backlash that the juntas exploited.
Q: Can Russian mercenaries succeed where Western forces failed? Evidence suggests not. Wagner and Africa Corps operate with fewer constraints on civilian harm, which accelerates short-term territorial gains but generates long-term recruitment for insurgents. Mali and Burkina Faso control less territory today than before Russian deployment.
Q: What would it take to stabilize the region? Genuine stabilization requires governance that populations experience as legitimate, economic opportunities that compete with jihadist recruitment, and security forces that protect rather than prey upon civilians. Current trajectories deliver none of these.
The Governance That Arrives
The Sahel’s jihadist insurgency offers a dark lesson in political economy. States that cannot tax, cannot protect, and cannot adjudicate will be replaced by organizations that can. The replacement need not be benevolent. It need only be more present than the alternative.
Coastal West Africa watches this lesson unfold across its northern borders. The spillover is not primarily military—though attacks are increasing. The spillover is organizational: the demonstration that governance vacuums get filled, that populations adapt to whoever provides order, and that the international community’s attention span is shorter than an insurgency’s time horizon.
The franchise continues to expand. Its tax collectors arrive on schedule. Its courts deliver verdicts. Its fighters control the roads. Somewhere in a ministry in Accra or Abidjan, an official reviews the latest security briefing and wonders how long the border will hold.
The answer depends on choices not yet made—and trade-offs not yet accepted.
Sources & Further Reading
The analysis in this article draws on research and reporting from:
- UNODC Transnational Organized Crime Threat Assessment - Sahel - comprehensive assessment of firearms, drug, and gold trafficking networks
- The Soufan Center Intelligence Brief - analysis of jihadist spillover into coastal West Africa
- Africa Center for Strategic Studies - examination of Fulani perspectives and grievances exploited by jihadist recruitment
- UNHCR Global Trends Report 2024 - documentation of displacement patterns across the Sahel
- SIPRI Climate, Peace and Security Fact Sheet - analysis of climate-conflict linkages in the region
- Population Reference Bureau - demographic projections and their security implications
- Amani Africa analysis of AES-ECOWAS withdrawal - institutional implications of regional fragmentation
- Relief Web assessment of JNIM illicit economies - documentation of jihadist financing mechanisms
