● Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso launch the Alliance of Sahel States (AES) as
a formal bloc, moving beyond its original 2023 security-pact mandate
toward economic and monetary integration, including plans for biometric
passports. (2024–2025)
Two scenes, unfolding within the same broad window of time.
In one, leaders of a new confederation enroll for a brand-new biometric
passport. A flag is designed. An anthem is formally adopted, specifically to
“strengthen regional identity.” An emblem is unveiled. This is a bloc building the
visible symbols of a nation.
In the other, a human rights report documents the deaths of ten people,
including a two-year-old child, in a security operation carried out by the same
alliance’s chosen military partner. This is a bloc failing, by multiple independent
accounts, at the exact mission it was originally founded to accomplish.
Which of these two faces is the real Alliance of Sahel States? And can a bloc
actually become the confederation it’s building institutions to look like, while the
thing it was originally founded to fix keeps getting worse?
Thread One: The Institution-Building Story
The AES’s formal evolution is worth tracing plainly, because the pace of it is
genuinely remarkable.
It began on September 16, 2023, as the Liptako-Gourma Charter — a
mutual-defense pact between Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, explicitly framed
around collective defense against jihadist threats in the Sahel region.
The upgrade to something much larger came less than a year later. At a summit
in Niamey on July 6, 2024, leaders of the three states signed a Confederation
Treaty, expanding the original security pact into a 25-point program of joint
action covering currency, defense, infrastructure, and foreign policy. This is the
moment the AES stopped being just a defense arrangement and became
something with much broader ambitions.
The institutional achievements since then are real and worth explaining clearly,
one by one. The AES biometric passport launched on January 29, 2025 — the
same day the bloc’s formal withdrawal from ECOWAS took effect. A common
biometric ID card followed, with technical specifications harmonized at a meeting
in Bamako in late 2024. Telephone roaming charges between member states were
abolished. A common official anthem was adopted on May 10, 2025. A formal AES
emblem was unveiled alongside it.
It’s worth pausing on what the AES’s own stated long-term goal actually is,
because it’s more ambitious than a typical trade bloc or defense pact. The
confederation’s documentation describes an eventual endpoint of full federation
— a single sovereign state, built from a common market, a monetary union under
a proposed shared currency, free movement of people, and coordinated
investment in industrialization, agriculture, mining, and energy.
And this project has already achieved a measure of genuine international
recognition. Since April 2025, France has officially recognized the AES passport
for Schengen visa purposes — a real, if uneven, sign that these new institutions
are gaining legitimacy beyond the bloc’s own borders.
Thread Two: The Security Reality Underneath It
Now pivot to the founding justification for all of this. The AES exists, at its origin,
as a security pact against jihadist insurgency. It’s worth asking plainly whether
that original goal is actually being met.
Here’s the shift that matters most. After Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin
died in a 2023 plane crash that most analysts believe Russia orchestrated,
Moscow restructured its mercenary presence across the Sahel, placing it under
direct Russian Ministry of Defense control and rebranding it as Africa Corps.
The documented numbers here are hard to read past. According to the Armed
Conflict and Event Location Database (ACLED), an independent global conflict
monitor, more than 5,000 civilians have been killed in Mali since 2023, with nearly
half of these attacks involving Russian mercenaries.
Human Rights Watch has been direct about what this represents. Ilaria Allegrozzi,
senior Sahel researcher at the organization, stated plainly that “Mali’s
Russia-backed transitional military government is not only committing horrific
abuses, but it is working to eliminate scrutiny into its human rights situation.”
One specific, documented incident makes this concrete rather than abstract. In
January 2025, forces connected to this security partnership arbitrarily executed
at least ten people, including women and a two-year-old child.
This isn’t one-sided reporting from a single advocacy group. Multiple
independent analyses, including research from the RAND Corporation, found
that the security situation in AES client countries has actually deteriorated since
Russian forces replaced UN and West African forces in the region — the opposite
of what the original 2023 security pact was explicitly meant to achieve.
The Convergence: Where the Two Threads Meet
Bring these two narrative strands together, because treating them as separate
stories misses the point entirely. The same governments issuing biometric
passports, adopting anthems, and building monetary union plans are the
governments whose counterterrorism partnerships are documented, by multiple
independent bodies, as committing likely war crimes and crimes against
humanity.
Institution-building and civilian protection are not automatically the same
project, even when they’re happening inside the same alliance at the same time.
A bloc can genuinely deepen its symbolic and economic integration while its core
original mission — protecting Sahelian civilians from violence — moves
backward, not forward.
This connects directly to the sovereignty framing running throughout this blog.
AES leaders describe all of this — the passport, the mercenary partnership, the
withdrawal from Western-aligned institutions — under the same banner of
reclaiming sovereignty from external control. It’s worth asking directly whether
trading a French counterterrorism partnership for a Russian mercenary
partnership actually represents more sovereignty, or simply a different external
power now embedded in the same security gap.
Close: Which Face Is Real?
Return to the opening juxtaposition, and resist the urge to resolve it neatly. Both
faces of the AES are real at the same time — the confederation genuinely
building new institutions and gaining real international recognition, and the
security crisis genuinely deepening under partnerships the bloc itself chose to
make.
A passport can be issued. An anthem can be adopted. A currency can be
planned. All of this can happen while the actual people this alliance was founded
to protect keep appearing in human rights reports instead of the ceremonies.
Two years into this project, that gap hasn’t closed. It’s widened.
