Opinion
As war in Ukraine enters a 5th year, will the ‘Putin consensus’ among Russians hold?
As Russia’s war in Ukraine enters its fifth year, Peter Rutland and Elizaveta Gaufman, surmise in this article that public support for President Vladimir Putin and the “special military operation” remains high in polls (over 80% approval for Putin, 60-70% for the war). However, the authors argue that this “Putin consensus” is fragile.
Peter Rutland, Wesleyan University and Elizaveta Gaufman, University of Groningen
Perceived wisdom has it that the longer a war goes on, the less enthusiastic a public becomes for continuing the conflict. After all, it is ordinary citizens who tend to bear the economic and human costs.
And yet, as the war following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 enters its fifth year, the attitude of the Russian public remains difficult to gauge: Just over half of Russians, according to one recent poll, expect the war to end in 2026; yet a majority say that should negotiations fail, Moscow needs to “escalate” with greater use of force.
As observers of Russian society, we believe this ambiguity in Russian public opinion gives President Vladimir Putin the cover to continue pushing hard for his goals in Ukraine. Yet at the same time, a deeper dive into the Russian public’s apparent support for the war suggests that it is more fragile than the Russian president would like to believe.
Putin’s social contract
From Day 1 of the conflict, Western strategy has been predicated on the belief that economic sanctions would eventually cause either the Russian elite or its society to persuade Putin to abandon the war.
This, in turn, is based on the assumption that the legitimacy of Putinism rests on a social contract of sorts: The Russian people will be loyal to the Kremlin if they enjoy a stable standard of living and are allowed to pursue their private lives without interference from the state.
The Russian economy has been struggling since 2014, so many analysts believed that this social contract was coming under strain even before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. However, after four years of war, the combination of exclusion from European markets and a tripling of military spending has led to economic stagnation and mounting pressure on living standards.
One problem with the social contract approach is that it tends to downplay the role of ideology.
It is possible that Putin’s “Make Russia Great Again” propaganda resonates with a significant part of the Russian public. Polling has consistently placed Putin’s approval rating above 80% since the beginning of the Ukraine conflict.
Of course, the validity of the results of polls in an authoritarian society at war cannot be taken at face value. Yet, one shouldn’t rule out that some of that support is genuine and rests not just on a stable economy but also on popular endorsement of Putin’s pledge to restore Russia’s power and influence on the world stage.
Rallying Russians
Some scholars point to a “rally around the flag” effect. There was an apparent surge in Putin’s approval rating after the use of military force against Ukraine in 2014 and 2022.
It is hard to tell whether the surge in support for Putin reflects a genuine shift in opinion or just a response to media coverage and what people perceive as the acceptable response.
The Kremlin has tried to hide the costs of the war from the public: concealing the true death toll and avoiding full-scale mobilization of conscripts by recruiting highly paid volunteers. It is also trying to keep the economy stable by drawing down the country’s reserve funds.
That leaves open the question of whether the “Putin consensus” will break down at some point in the future if the costs of the war start to hit home for a majority of Russians.
The problem with polls
The consensus view among observers is that a small minority of Russians oppose the war, a slightly larger minority enthusiastically support the war, and the majority passively go along with what the state is doing.
There are still some independent pollsters conducting surveys in Russia that report a high level of support among respondents for the “special military operation” against Ukraine, with figures ranging between 60% and 70%.
A number of researchers have pointed out the difficulty in getting an accurate snapshot of Russian public opinion, given that the polling questions might make the respondent fearful of being accused of breaking laws that penalize “spreading fake news” and “discrediting the army” with a lengthy prison sentence.
The Levada Center, which is still regarded as an independent and relatively reliable pollster, conducts its interviews face to face in people’s homes but has a very low response rate. Polls conducted online, in return for monetary rewards, can try to find demographically balanced respondents, but the problem of wariness about giving answers that are critical of the regime remains. In Russia’s current political environment, refusing to answer or giving a socially acceptable response is a rational strategy.
Some scholars, such as those associated with the Public Sociology Laboratory, which looks at public sentiment in post-Soviet states, still conduct fieldwork inside Russia, sending researchers to live incognito in provincial towns and observe social practices involving support for the war.
Their ethnographic research finds little evidence for a “rally around the flag” effect in provincial Russian society. Other analysts have turned to digital ethnography of social media as an alternative source of insight. But analysts unfamiliar with the local and digital context risk mistaking performative loyalty for genuine belief.
‘Internal emigration’
Most Russian citizens try to avoid political discussion altogether and retreat into what is often described as “internal emigration” – living their own lives while keeping interactions with the authorities to a minimum.
This practice dates back to the Soviet period but resurfaced as political repression increased after Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012.
There is no doubt that there are many fervent war supporters in Russia. They are quite vocal and visible because the state allows them to be – such as the military bloggers reporting from the front lines.
Apart from looking at opinion polls and social media, one can also probe the level of genuine support for the war by looking at everyday practices. If popular support for the war were enthusiastic, recruitment offices would be overwhelmed. They are not.
Instead, Russia has relied heavily on financial incentives, aggressive advertising, prison recruitment and coercive mobilization. At the same time, hundreds of thousands of men have sought to avoid conscription by leaving the country, hiding from authorities or exploiting legal exemptions.
Symbolic participation follows a similar pattern. State-sponsored Z symbols continue to dominate public space – the letter Z is used as a symbol of support for the war, in slogans such as “Za pobedu,” which translates to “for victory.” But privately displayed signs of support have largely disappeared.
Humanitarian aid to be sent to soldiers on the front lines or occupied Ukraine is often collected through schools and churches, where participation is shaped by social or administrative pressure. But many participants frame their involvement as helping individuals rather than supporting the war itself.
Reality vs. lived experience
High-profile propaganda products frequently fail to resonate. Music charts and streaming platforms in Russia are dominated not by patriotic anthems but by an eclectic mix of songs about personal relationships, such as Jakone’s moody ballad “Eyes As Wet As Asphalt,” songs in praise of “Hoodies” and even a catchy Bashkir folk song.
Book sales show strong demand for works such as George Orwell’s “1984” and Viktor Frankl’s Holocaust memoir “Man’s Search for Meaning,” suggesting that readers are searching for ways to understand authoritarianism, trauma and moral responsibility rather than celebrating militarism.
And instead of watching the state-backed film “Tolerance,” a dystopian tale of moral decay in the West, Russians are streaming the “Heated Rivalry” gay hockey romance.
Putin’s campaign to promote what he sees as traditional values appears not to be cutting through. Divorce rates are among the highest in the world – and birth rates continue to fall.
Heading into the Ukraine war’s fifth year, the gulf between the Kremlin version of reality and the lived experience of ordinary Russians remains. It echoes a pattern we have seen before: In the final decade of the Soviet Union the Kremlin became increasingly out of touch with the views of its people.
History will not necessarily repeat itself – but the masters of the Kremlin should be conscious of the parallels.
Peter Rutland, Professor of Government, Wesleyan University and Elizaveta Gaufman, Assistant Professor of Russian Discourse and Politics, University of Groningen
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
JNIM now strikes at capitals and governs territory, and the bet that Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger placed on Russia as their sole security guarantor has failed. Analyst and researcher Joseph McCarthy writes that the fire will not stop at the Sahel’s borders, and Ghana stands directly in its path.
The Sahel is Burning, and West Africa Cannot Look Away
By Joseph McCarthy
At dawn on 18 June 2026, fighters stormed Diori Hamani International Airport in Niamey, the most heavily guarded site in Niger’s capital. It is not merely an airport. The complex houses the air force, most of the country’s drones, the headquarters of the Alliance of Sahel States’ joint force, the Russian personnel meant to help crush the insurgency, and even uranium stocks the state hopes to sell. JNIM claimed the assault, which killed eleven soldiers and two civilians. It was the second strike on that complex this year; the Islamic State’s Sahel Province claimed a January raid. Both of the region’s jihadist franchises have now breached the defences of a capital. This was not just another attack. It was a strategic signal.
It was also no act of opportunism. Hitting a fortified installation in a capital demands months of surveillance, intelligence on shift changes, the logistics to move fighters and weapons over long distances, and the ability to slip past layered security. It implies networks operating close to, or inside, the capital itself. As the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data project noted, the Sahel’s insurgents have moved from localised rural fighting to coordinated strikes on vital national infrastructure. The pattern is everywhere. In Mali, JNIM has throttled Bamako with a fuel blockade since September 2025, destroying hundreds of tankers; in April, it overran the garrison town of Kati and killed the defence minister in his own home; it has since placed a bounty of two million euros on the head of Mali’s junta leader, Assimi Goïta.
More troubling than the firepower is the governance. A Reuters investigation found that JNIM now arbitrates land disputes, collects taxes, enforces rules and imposes a rough order in territories the state has vacated. Forged from the merger of four groups, it increasingly presents itself not as a militia but as an alternative authority, building legitimacy among populations long neglected by distant governments. History is unkind here: from Afghanistan to Somalia, insurgencies that learn to govern outlast those that only fight. The contest is no longer simply about defeating armed men. It is about whether the state, rather than an armed movement, remains the most credible source of authority, justice and security.
Against all this, the juntas made a bet. Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger expelled Western forces, walked out of ECOWAS, and rebuilt their security around a single guarantor: Russia, first through the Wagner Group, then the Africa Corps. On 26 June, Burkina Faso severed diplomatic relations with France entirely, accusing Paris of backing the very terrorists it claims to fight, an allegation offered without evidence and flatly rejected. Niger’s government, for its part, blamed the Niamey attack on mercenaries funded by President Macron, again without proof. The promise was straightforward: sovereignty restored, foreign influence reduced, terrorism defeated. Judged by the junta’s own promise, the bet has failed. The violence has not receded. It has spread.
This should not be read as a uniquely Russian failure. It exposes the limits of any strategy built around a single external guarantor. No partner, whether Russia, France or the United States, can resolve a conflict rooted in governance failure, economic exclusion, local grievance and hollow institutions. Force can kill fighters. It cannot rebuild public trust, settle a quarrel between communities, open a clinic or create a job for an idle young man, and those are the very conditions the insurgents harvest for recruits. Russia carries constraints of its own: bogged down in Ukraine, its resources finite, it was outfought alongside Malian troops at Kidal even after reportedly receiving a warning of the assault. A security architecture resting on a single distracted partner does not reduce risk; it concentrates it, and when that partner underdelivers, there is no second line. The 2026 Global Terrorism Index now names the Sahel the global epicentre of terrorism, the source of more than half the world’s terrorism deaths and one in five of its attacks.
None of this stays in the Sahel. Ghana shares roughly 550 kilometres of frontier with Burkina Faso, much of it porous and threaded with informal crossings used daily by traders and herders. Southward expansion rarely begins with a spectacular attack. It begins quietly: a recruiter, a supply route, a financing cell, fighters embedding in border communities long before a shot is fired. That is precisely how the contagion crossed from Mali into Burkina Faso and Niger, and how it has already reached Benin and Togo, with Côte d’Ivoire and northern Ghana plainly exposed. Alongside the fighters’ travels, something almost as corrosive: a flood of assault rifles, explosives and military hardware that does not stop at extremist hands but arms robbers, traffickers and illegal mining syndicates, hollowing out a country’s security long before any jihadist banner appears.
The wider world has its own reasons to watch. Niger holds some of the planet’s richest uranium. A jihadist proto-state straddling West Africa would command migration routes toward the coast and the Mediterranean, strain fragile coastal economies, disrupt trade corridors and rattle investor confidence. At the same time, every successful strike on a capital broadcasts a template to armed groups from Nigeria to Mozambique. What looks today like a regional security crisis could become an international one. A region generating one in five of the world’s militant attacks is not a distant problem. It is a lit fuse.
Africa has paid before for believing that outside powers can guarantee its security. They cannot. Partners can offer intelligence, training and equipment; they cannot substitute for legitimate governance and functioning institutions. This crisis will be settled not only on the battlefield but in courtrooms, classrooms, local councils and marketplaces, where citizens decide whether the state or an armed movement better delivers justice and opportunity. For Ghana, the task is preventive, not reactive: intelligence cooperation, stronger borders, regional collaboration, community resilience and investment in local governance, all of it far cheaper than containment once the violence has taken root. And for the Sahel’s rulers, there is a harder truth.
Sovereignty that trades several partners for total dependence on one distant and overstretched power is not sovereignty; it is a fresh vulnerability dressed in the language of liberation. The question is no longer whether the crisis will spread beyond Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger. It already has. The only question left is whether West Africa acts before the Sahel becomes the world’s next strategic emergency.
Joseph McCarthy is an analyst and researcher specialising in governance, security, and political transitions in the Sahel. He writes on geopolitics, development, and African diplomacy. Email: joecarthy30@gmail.com
Opinion
Under One African Sky: Xenophobia, Historical Memory, and the Erosion of Pan-African Brotherhood | Colonel Augustine Ansu Rtd
The recurring outbreak of xenophobic violence in South Africa has once again forced a painful question upon the continent: Has Africa forgotten its own history of solidarity?
In this opinion piece, Colonel Augustine Ansu (Rtd) examines the troubling narratives used to justify attacks on fellow Africans — from complaints about jobs and businesses to the claim that anti-apartheid exiles were not granted unrestricted integration. He argues that such arguments rest on a historically flawed understanding of continental sacrifice. Drawing on the legacy of nations like Ghana, Zambia, Tanzania, and Angola that provided sanctuary and support to South Africa’s liberation struggle, Ansu asks whether the spirit of Pan-African brotherhood can survive economic anxiety, political rhetoric, and the erosion of historical memory.
This is a call not merely to condemn xenophobia, but to recover the solidarity that once made strangers into comrades.
Read the full opinion piece below.
Under One African Sky: Xenophobia, Historical Memory, and the Erosion of Pan-African Brotherhood
By Colonel Augustine Ansu Rtd
The recurring outbreaks of xenophobic violence in South Africa continue to trouble the conscience of Africa.
Each episode raises difficult questions about citizenship, economic competition, national identity, and the future of Pan-African solidarity.
Recent events, including the evacuation of foreign nationals and the debates that have followed, have once again brought these issues into sharp focus.
What is perhaps most disturbing is not merely the violence itself, but the narratives increasingly used to justify it.
In a recent media interview, a South African citizen reportedly questioned why foreigners should be allowed to settle so freely in South Africa.
He argued that during the anti-apartheid struggle, South African exiles lived in camps in neighbouring countries and were not permitted unrestricted integration into host societies.
He further complained that foreigners were taking jobs, businesses, and even girlfriends from South Africans.
Such arguments deserve careful examination.
The comparison between anti-apartheid exiles and present-day African migrants is historically flawed.
South Africans who fled apartheid were not merely housed in refugee camps. Across the continent, they benefited from the generosity and sacrifice of fellow Africans.
Nations such as Ghana, Zambia, Tanzania, Angola, and many others provided sanctuary, education, military training, diplomatic support, and political platforms from which the struggle against apartheid could be waged.
African governments and peoples embraced the South African cause as a continental cause. Their support was not based upon narrow calculations of national advantage but upon a profound belief that the freedom of one African people was inseparable from the freedom of all.
That history makes contemporary hostility towards fellow Africans especially painful.
Equally revealing is the complaint that foreigners are taking local girlfriends. Such rhetoric has little to do with immigration policy and much to do with insecurity, resentment, and the search for convenient scapegoats.
Throughout history, xenophobic movements have often been fuelled by claims that outsiders are taking what rightfully belongs to citizens—jobs, opportunities, homes, culture, and relationships.
These narratives are powerful because they simplify complex social problems into emotionally satisfying explanations. Yet they rarely lead to solutions.
The roots of social unrest are usually found elsewhere: unemployment, poverty, inequality, corruption, inadequate education, weak governance, and the failure of economic growth to improve the lives of ordinary citizens. When these problems persist, public frustration seeks an outlet. Foreigners become convenient targets because they are visible, vulnerable, and politically expendable.
Yet many immigrants contribute significantly to the South African economy. They establish businesses, create employment, provide essential services, and participate in commercial activities that sustain local communities. Like migrants throughout history, they seek opportunity, security, and a better future for their families.
Against this backdrop, the decision by some African governments to evacuate their citizens deserves thoughtful consideration.
Every government has a sacred duty to protect its nationals. When there is credible concern for their safety, prudence demands action.
Governments cannot wait for tragedy to occur before responding. Their first responsibility is not the preservation of diplomatic appearances but the protection of human life.
This explains why many Africans have viewed suggestions that governments should have delayed evacuation efforts with understandable scepticism.
While such opinions may stem from concerns about national image or fears of creating panic, they must be weighed against the immediate responsibility to safeguard citizens facing uncertainty and possible danger.
Equally troubling are reports that xenophobic attacks sometimes occur in the presence of law enforcement officers who appear unable or unwilling to intervene decisively.
Whether such perceptions are entirely accurate or not, they contribute significantly to fear among foreign communities.
When perpetrators believe that consequences are unlikely, violence becomes easier to organise and repeat.
Some observers have suggested that these developments reflect a broader political agenda. Others see them as spontaneous eruptions of public frustration. Whatever the explanation, history demonstrates that xenophobia seldom emerges in isolation. It thrives where economic anxiety, political rhetoric, weak institutions, and social frustration converge.
The tragedy extends beyond immigration policy.
It concerns the future of Pan-Africanism itself.
The generation that fought apartheid inspired the world with its vision of justice, reconciliation, human dignity, and non-racialism.
South Africa became a symbol of hope, proving that even the deepest divisions could be overcome through courage, sacrifice, and leadership.
Today, many Africans struggle to reconcile that inspiring legacy with recurring images of fellow Africans being harassed, assaulted, or forced to flee.
They remember a time when the continent stood united against apartheid and wonder how the descendants of those who benefited from continental solidarity can now regard fellow Africans as unwelcome intruders.
These are uncomfortable questions, but they cannot be ignored.
Can Africans continue to speak of continental unity while fellow Africans are treated as outsiders?
Can the sacrifices made during the liberation struggles be honoured while the spirit of brotherhood that sustained those struggles is gradually eroded?
Can Pan-Africanism survive if economic hardship repeatedly transforms neighbours into enemies?
History offers a sobering lesson. Nations rarely prosper by directing their anger towards convenient scapegoats. Sustainable progress is achieved through economic reform, effective governance, educational opportunity, social cohesion, and unwavering commitment to the rule of law.
The future of Africa will not be secured through exclusion and suspicion. It will be secured through cooperation, mutual respect, and a renewed recognition of our shared destiny.
For the struggle against colonialism and apartheid was never simply a political struggle. It was also a moral declaration that the dignity of one African is bound to the dignity of all Africans.
That declaration remains as relevant today as it was yesterday.
Epilogue: Under One African Sky
The African sky knows no borders.
The winds that cross the Limpopo do not carry passports; the rivers that flow to the sea recognize no tribe. The rains that nourish the veld, the savannah, and the forest make no distinction between native and stranger.
Yet man, who inherited one continent and one destiny, has learned to build walls where history built bridges and to sow suspicion where our forebears planted solidarity.
The challenge before Africa is therefore not merely to defeat xenophobia. It is to recover the brotherhood that once made strangers into comrades and neighbours into family.
For when one African is hunted because he is foreign, all Africa is diminished. When one African is denied dignity because of his origin, the dream of Pan-Africanism suffers a wound. And when fear triumphs over fraternity, the sacrifices of those who fought for Africa’s liberation fade a little further into the shadows.
Let us remember that before colonial frontiers were drawn, before passports were stamped, before flags were raised, the peoples of Africa shared the same sun, the same rivers, the same hopes, and often the same blood.
May wisdom prevail over anger, justice over prejudice, and fraternity over fear.
Then perhaps future generations will inherit an Africa in which no man is hated for the place of his birth, no woman is threatened because of her nationality, and no child grows up believing that another African is an enemy.
For above us all stretches the same vast African sky — silent, enduring, and waiting for its children to remember that they are one.
When military juntas seized power in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger between 2020 and 2023, they promised sovereignty, security, and national dignity. Several years on, the evidence tells a brutal story. Large portions of the Sahel remain outside state control, with jihadist groups like JNIM and Islamic State affiliates growing more sophisticated and operationally bolder. In this urgent analysis, security researcher Joseph McCarthy argues that West Africa’s future stability depends on rebuilding states that citizens trust, economies that create opportunity, and regionally coordinated security architecture, because the Sahel’s collapse cannot be treated as someone else’s problem.
Read the full analysis below:
Sahel on fire: Why Ghana and ECOWAS cannot ignore the collapse of the AES
When soldiers seized power in Bamako in 2020, Ouagadougou in 2022, and Niamey in 2023, they offered a familiar promise: civilian governments had failed, foreign partnerships had grown corrupt, and only military rule could restore sovereignty, security, and national dignity.
Across the Sahel, millions exhausted by years of insecurity and perceived foreign condescension believed them.
Several years on, the evidence tells a brutal and irrefutable story.
The security situation across Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, the three countries that form the self-styled Alliance of Sahel States (AES), now reveals something the juntas can no longer paper over with slogans.
Large portions of northern and eastern Burkina Faso are either under jihadist influence or violently contested.
In Mali, the regions of Taoudéni, Timbuktu, Ménaka, Gao, and much of Mopti remain outside effective state authority.
Niger retains a stronger foothold around Niamey and Maradi, but insecurity is steadily creeping into Diffa, Tahoua, and Agadez.
The trajectory across all three countries is identical: state presence is shrinking; militant mobility corridors are expanding southward.
The April 2026 coordinated attacks across Mali, striking Mopti, Gao, Kidal, Sévaré, and approach routes to Bamako simultaneously, confirmed what conflict monitors at ACLED and the Critical Threats Project had been documenting for months. Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM) and Islamic State affiliates are not retreating.
They are growing more sophisticated, more coordinated, and operationally bolder.
When insurgents can strike urban and semi-urban centres, spaces that house military headquarters, administrative institutions, and strategic infrastructure, with precision and impunity, military presence alone has clearly ceased to guarantee territorial control.
The core problem is structural.
Terrorism in the Sahel has never been purely a military challenge.
Extremist organisations thrive where governance collapses, public trust erodes, and economic opportunities evaporate.
Governments may announce the destruction of militant camps or the recapture of towns.
But if corruption, unemployment, food insecurity, and local grievances go unresolved, recruitment resumes elsewhere.
The cycle continues.
Military-led governments are structurally ill-equipped to break that cycle.
Officers trained for battlefield command are now expected to manage fragile economies, attract investment, regulate inflation, and deliver social services.
Predictably, all three juntas have addressed profoundly complex national crises almost entirely through a security lens.
The consequences are visible: authority in Burkina Faso barely extends beyond Ouagadougou and a few southern towns; Bamako’s security perimeter has reportedly contracted; central Mali remains an unresolved warzone.
Meanwhile, judicial independence weakens, civil society operates under pressure, media freedoms narrow, and decision-making grows opaque and personalised. Investor confidence has collapsed. Trade routes have frayed.
The result is a self-reinforcing cycle: insecurity discourages investment, weak development fuels grievance, grievance powers recruitment, and governments respond with yet more militarisation.
The junta compounded this failure with a catastrophic strategic miscalculation: they dismantled every cooperative framework that had previously helped contain extremist expansion. MINUSMA was expelled.
French military operations ended. American intelligence and surveillance assets withdrew.
EU training missions deteriorated or closed. ECOWAS security cooperation collapsed.
In their place came Russian-linked security actors, first the Wagner Group, then the Africa Corps. This shift has not produced decisive results.
Western and multilateral partners had provided drone surveillance, aerial logistics, rapid evacuation support, command training, and multinational operational coordination.
Russia’s deployment has remained narrower, more militarised, and heavily oriented around regime protection rather than population security.
The fall of Kidal said everything.
Once showcased as proof that expelling Western forces and embracing Moscow represented strategic genius, Kidal instead exposed the new model’s core vulnerability.
When Russian-linked personnel reportedly withdrew as Malian forces came under attack, it shattered years of carefully cultivated political messaging.
Facts eventually overpower slogans, and those facts are now arriving at a pace.
The consequences no longer stop at the AES border.
The Sahel has become a sanctuary where extremist organisations regroup, recruit, train, and launch operations southward into coastal West Africa. Benin has already suffered deadly attacks near Pendjari National Park.
Côte d’Ivoire endured the Grand-Bassam massacre and continues fortifying its northern frontier.
Togo has seen infiltration pressure mount. Ghana, which has not yet experienced large-scale jihadist violence, is not insulated from what is coming.
The expansion of JNIM and IS-affiliated operations into southern Burkina Faso has intensified arms trafficking, infiltration networks, and radicalisation risks along Ghana’s northern border.
The Bawku conflict, rooted in ethnic and chieftaincy tensions, presents precisely the kind of local instability that extremist organisations have exploited elsewhere to gain a foothold.
Ghanaian security agencies have responded with Operation Conquered Fist, expanded border surveillance, joint intelligence operations, and counter-extremism programmes, all reflecting a growing, sober recognition that this crisis is no longer distant. It is at the door.
The lesson the Sahel has taught, at enormous human cost, is clear: no country defeats a transnational insurgency through isolationist nationalism or militarised governance alone. Security and development are inseparable.
Roads, schools, healthcare, agriculture, jobs, and functioning local governance are as essential to counterterrorism as soldiers and weapons. Where states are absent, extremists fill the space.
West Africa’s future security architecture must be African-led, regionally coordinated, and built on genuine interoperability: shared intelligence, joint border operations, and integrated economic resilience.
External partnerships have a role, but one that strengthens African institutional capacity rather than substituting for it.
Sustainable security cannot be outsourced to mercenaries or purchased through battlefield operations alone.
Ghana and the wider ECOWAS community cannot afford to treat the Sahel as someone else’s problem.
The region’s long-term stability will depend on building states that citizens trust, economies that create opportunity, and institutions capable of collective action.
The AES experience has shown, at devastating cost, what happens when those foundations are abandoned.
West Africa cannot afford to learn that lesson twice.
About the author:
Joseph McCarthy is an analyst and researcher specialising in governance, security, and political transitions in the Sahel. He writes on geopolitics, development, and African diplomacy. Email: joecarthy30@gmail.com
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