While terrorist activity has increased across the entire Sahel region, by far the greatest increase occurred in the Central Sahel: Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger, most noticeably in the tri-border area. This section focuses on the connection between organised crime and terrorism in the Central Sahel specifically Violence tends to be more intense in

Why only these five countries? It is because they are the heart of the Sahel and the most threatened by the jihadist phenomenon. They also have similar characteristics on all levels (geographical, cultural, environmental, etc.). The specificity of the Sahel itself is based on vast desert and underpopulated territories. What is also common to the fi

Another geopolitical challenge in the Sahel, resulting from ethnic varieties, is the fact that neither the identity of the whole nor the identity of each state can be symbolized by a common language or a common alphabet. Certainly, these countries have French and Arabic, as the case may be, as official languages, but these do not in any way reflect

The Sahel confronts global policymakers with a whole range of serious challenges – fragile states, poverty, refugees and migrants, transnational organised crime (TOC) and jihadist insurgencies. The question of state stability in the Sahel is therefore more prominent on the international agenda than it has ever been, and the magnitude of internati

The emphasis on these front-line States does not preclude tangential focus and gathering of data and use of examples from other Sahelian States. Countries of secondary focus include Algeria, Cameroon, Chad and Guinea Bissau. When the study began, Cameroon and Chad had not yet acquired their current status as significant extensions to the Northeast