Liptako-Gourma Charter, September 2023

What the AES is

2023 to today

The Alliance of Sahel States (AES) is an intergovernmental organization of three countries: Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger. Its founding document is the Liptako-Gourma Charter, signed on 16 September 2023 by the three military governments. The charter began as a mutual defense pact against jihadist insurgencies and organized crime in the Liptako-Gourma, the tri-border zone where the three countries meet.

A break with the regional order

All three states had been through military coups: Mali in 2021, Burkina Faso in 2022, Niger in 2023. ECOWAS suspended each of them. In January 2025 the three formally withdrew from the bloc, arguing that it served external interests, above all French ones, and had done little to help them fight the insurgencies.

From defense pact to confederation

On 6 July 2024, at the first AES summit in Niamey, the three signed a treaty that turned the alliance into a confederation. The project has since grown to include a unified military command, a joint force of roughly 5,000 personnel, a confederal investment bank, and a protocol on free movement of people and goods. The presidency rotates, and Captain Ibrahim Traoré of Burkina Faso took it over in December 2025.

What kind of project it is

The AES marks a sovereigntist break with the arrangements France built in the region: the CFA franc, permanent military bases, economies organized around exporting raw materials to Europe. It is not a socialist project. Its leaders are military officers working with real popular anti-imperialism, resource nationalism, and the practical need to find security and economic partners outside the West. Whether that opening becomes more than an opening depends on forces the officers do not control.

Berlin Conference, 1884

The scramble for Africa

1880 to 1960

Capital looking for materials

Between roughly 1880 and 1914 the European powers divided Africa among themselves. The partition followed from the shift to monopoly capitalism in Britain, France, Germany, and Belgium. Industrial capacity had outgrown the raw materials available at home, and African territory supplied rubber, cotton, cocoa, palm oil, and minerals, along with captive markets for European manufactures.

The Berlin Conference of 1884 and 1885 set the rules, and no African representative was in the room. The borders drawn there still frame the politics of the Sahel, which is why the AES inherits an arbitrary set of states rather than a set that anyone in the region chose.

Rosa Luxemburg’s argument applies directly: capital accumulation needs non-capitalist regions to supply cheap labor, cheap materials, and markets. French West Africa, the AOF, covering present-day Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Senegal, Guinea, Côte d’Ivoire, and others, was organized as an extractive zone for the metropole.

Land

The colonial state declared land vacant and transferred it to concessionary companies. Peasants lost the best ground and moved either into wage labor on European plantations or into cash crops on marginal land. In the AOF this dismantled subsistence agriculture in favor of cotton, groundnuts, and cocoa grown for European industry rather than for African communities.

Forced labor

Forced labor, the travail forcé, lasted in French West Africa until 1946. Administrations conscripted Africans for railway construction, roads, port work, and plantations, usually through co-opted chiefs. Chiefs were paid a bounty of ten francs for every worker they supplied to the railways, which turned traditional authority into a recruiting arm of colonial capital. A decree of 23 May 1896 criminalized vagabondage and begging, giving the state a legal instrument for pulling all available labor into colonial enterprises.

Prices

Colonial trading companies held monopsony power: they were the only buyers of African produce, so they set producer prices well below world market levels and kept the difference as super-profit. The economic historian Federico Tadei estimates that trade monopsonies and coercive labor institutions cut African gains from trade by more than 60 percent. That surplus financed infrastructure in Europe, not in Africa.

Money

The CFA franc, created in 1945, tied the currencies of French African colonies to the French franc and later to the euro. African states had to deposit a large share of their foreign reserves in the French Treasury and peg their currency to Paris. Monetary policy was set in Paris, which blocked independent development finance and kept African economies oriented toward French needs. The CFA franc is a central grievance in Sahelian anti-imperialist politics and one of the targets of the AES’s sovereignty claims.

The civilizing mission

Colonial ideology presented extraction as a civilizing mission. The infrastructure that was built, railways and ports, moved raw materials out; it did not link African economies to one another. Schools and hospitals were few and segregated. The colonial state worked as a committee for managing the exploitation of African labor and resources on behalf of European capital.

The legacy

The colonial economy left structural dependency behind: states exporting commodities and importing manufactures, with no control over prices or monetary policy. That dependency is the material basis of neocolonialism, and it is what Modibo Keïta and Thomas Sankara tried to break.

Union Soudanaise-RDA

Modibo Keïta and the Malian road

1960 to 1968

Modibo Keïta (1915 to 1977) was the first president of independent Mali, from 1960 until 1968, and one of the central figures in the third wave of Pan-Africanism alongside Kwame Nkrumah, Sékou Touré, and Patrice Lumumba. A teacher by training and a socialist by conviction, he led the Union Soudanaise-Rassemblement Démocratique Africain, which organized workers, peasants, and youth against French colonial rule.

Federation first

Keïta did not treat independence as a national question alone. He wanted a West African federation that could pool resources and resist neocolonial economic pressure. In 1959 the French Sudan joined Senegal in the Mali Federation, which became independent in 1960 and split the same year over differences between Keïta and Léopold Senghor. Keïta was willing to give up sovereignty for African unity because he understood that small, balkanized states could not hold off imperialism on their own.

The socialist years

After independence Keïta ran a state-led development program: nationalization of key sectors, state enterprises, a national currency (the Malian franc, issued outside the CFA), and ambitious campaigns in education and health. He built close relations with the Soviet Union and China and placed Mali inside the non-aligned movement.

What France did

France answered by withdrawing technical assistance, sabotaging the new currency, and working to destabilize the government. In 1968 the New York Times reported that Keïta had finally confronted economic reality by turning back to France for an austerity program, which reverses the order of events: the pressure came first and the austerity was the concession. The same article conceded the general pattern, noting that a combination of economic and military factors usually makes it extremely difficult for a young African government to sustain a course independent of its former colonial ruler.

In November 1968 Moussa Traoré overthrew Keïta in a coup in which French involvement is widely suspected. Keïta died in prison in 1977.

The lesson

The Keïta government shows the limits of national bourgeois development in a country surrounded by hostile imperialist powers. Without a revolutionary party and an organized worker and peasant base capable of defending the process, even a sincere anti-imperialist leadership stays exposed to coups that outside powers are glad to support.

National Council of the Revolution

Thomas Sankara

1983 to 1987

Thomas Sankara (1949 to 1987) took power in Burkina Faso, then Upper Volta, in August 1983 through a revolution led by junior officers and backed by mass organizations. He was a Marxist-Leninist who rejected both capitalist development and Soviet-style bureaucratic centralism. His method was the mass line: the Burkinabè would develop their own land and rely on themselves instead of on the West.

The program

Under the National Council of the Revolution the government moved on several fronts at once.

On sovereignty, it denounced French neocolonial control, expelled French advisers, and refused to repay the colonial debt, which is where the line quoted above comes from.

On the economy, it nationalized land and mineral resources, carried out agrarian reform, raised food production, and refused IMF and World Bank structural adjustment.

On social policy, it ran mass vaccination campaigns that cut infant mortality sharply, built schools and clinics through popular mobilization, banned forced marriage and female genital mutilation, and organized a national reforestation campaign.

On Pan-Africanism, it supported liberation movements in South Africa and Palestine and argued for African unity against imperialism.

The assassination

Sankara was killed on 15 October 1987 in a coup led by Blaise Compaoré, his former comrade, who then ruled for 27 years with French backing. The coup was counterrevolutionary. It returned Burkina Faso to the neocolonial fold, and Compaoré’s government became a main channel for French influence in the region, hosting French bases and facilitating French interventions.

Why he still matters

Two conclusions follow from Sankara’s experience. First, a genuine anti-imperialist revolution on the periphery is possible: an organized and mobilized population can transform a country against heavy odds. Second, imperialism answers such projects with extreme violence. His ideas remain a live reference for Sahelian youth. When the 2014 uprising overthrew Compaoré, demonstrators carried his portrait and chanted his slogans.

He who feeds you, controls you.
Thomas Sankara, OAU summit, 1987

From defense pact to confederation

How the AES formed

2011 to 2024

Three crises converged on the same three states.

The security crisis

NATO’s 2011 intervention in Libya pushed weapons and fighters across the Sahel. Jihadist insurgencies, among them Ansar Dine, AQIM, and ISGS, spread from northern Mali into Burkina Faso and Niger. The states affected depended on French military support, first Operation Serval and then Barkhane, and could not defeat the insurgency.

French forces came to be seen as part of the problem, accused of working with jihadist groups in order to justify a permanent presence and to control resource-rich areas. Anti-French sentiment hardened into a single demand: France must leave.

The legitimacy crisis

The coups in Mali in 2021, Burkina Faso in 2022, and Niger in 2023 drew mass support in the capitals. The civilian governments they replaced were seen as corrupt, dependent on France, and unable to defend the country. Assimi Goïta, Ibrahim Traoré, and Abdourahamane Tchiani presented themselves as sovereigntist nationalists who would break with France and fight the war on their own terms.

The regional order crisis

ECOWAS, dominated by Nigeria and aligned with Western interests, imposed severe sanctions on the coup states and threatened military intervention in Niger. The pressure produced the opposite of what it was meant to produce and pushed the three capitals together. The Liptako-Gourma Charter in September 2023 answered the ECOWAS threat directly, and a mutual defense pact became a political and economic project.

Confederation

The July 2024 treaty consolidated that trajectory. AES leaders describe the bloc as the most effective sub-regional force fighting the insurgencies, and they point to ECOWAS’s refusal to take part in the fighting. The confederal bank, the stabilization fund, and the unified force are meant as institutions of sovereignty that do not depend on structures the West dominates.

Unified force, mines, and the CFA franc

What the AES is doing

2024 to today

Security

Military integration comes first. The AES has set up a joint force of about 5,000 troops, with a legal statute validated by the three defense ministers in July 2026. The force is designed for cross-border operations against jihadist groups, which meant removing the administrative barriers that used to slow coordination. The AES has also widened its suppliers of arms and training, turning to Russia through the Africa Corps, the successor to Wagner, and to Turkey. That ends the French monopoly on military cooperation.

The results are poor. Jihadist violence keeps displacing large numbers of people, and the military governments have been accused of abuses in their counterinsurgency campaigns. A purely military answer cannot settle a crisis rooted in poverty, marginalization, and the borders left by colonialism. What has changed is the terms of the argument: the governments now claim to be fighting for sovereignty, not for a foreign patron.

Resources and money

On resources the AES has moved fast. Mining codes have been revised to raise state revenue from gold and uranium, and 2024 and 2025 brought nationalizations of key assets, mostly in mining. Niger’s uranium, which supplies French nuclear power, is the sharpest case: the new government has contested French control of Imouraren and other deposits.

The CFA franc remains the unresolved question. All three states are still in the CFA zone, though Niger’s post-coup government has questioned membership. Full monetary sovereignty means leaving the CFA and issuing an independent currency, a step that carries large economic risks and large political weight. The Confederal Investment Bank and the stabilization fund exist, but they are small and new.

Regional integration

The AES has launched a confederal television station, a protocol on free movement of people and goods inside the AES space, and a parliamentary assembly inaugurated in August 2026. These are modest but concrete, and they go further toward regional integration than most post-independence attempts in West Africa. The AES also builds ties with other sovereigntist governments on the continent and presents itself as a pole of anti-imperialist resistance.

The contradiction

The AES is run by military officers, not by a revolutionary party and not by an organized popular class. Its anti-imperialism is real but nationalist and pragmatic, not socialist. It has not redistributed land, dismantled class structures, or given workers and peasants systematic power. The risk is that the AES leaders end up like Keïta: removed or absorbed if they fail to improve daily life, or if they antagonize too many outside powers at once.

The honest assessment is that the AES is a progressive but unstable rupture inside the neocolonial order. It opens space for anti-imperialist organizing and for socialist demands, and it is not itself socialism. Revolutionaries should defend it against destabilization while organizing independently to push for deeper change.

Three scenarios and some tasks

The future

Scenarios

Consolidation

The AES survives external pressure, builds its confederal institutions, leaves the CFA, and becomes a durable regional bloc with imitators elsewhere on the continent. The risk inside this scenario is that it stays a militarized, top-down project that never touches class exploitation and turns into a new state capitalism dependent on Russian or Gulf capital.

Rollback

France and its allies, working through ECOWAS proxies, covert operations, or sanctions, destabilize one or more AES states. A coup or an internal split reverses the sovereigntist turn. The lesson is blunt: sovereignty without popular power is fragile.

Revolutionary deepening

Youth, workers, and peasants push the AES governments further left, with demands for land reform, workers’ rights, and real democratic participation. The AES becomes a transitional formation toward a more radical break with capitalism. Marxists should organize toward this outcome while admitting that nothing guarantees it.

Tasks for anti-imperialists

  • Defend the AES’s right to sovereignty against French and ECOWAS pressure, without endorsing its governments wholesale.
  • Build solidarity between Sahelian workers and peasants and anti-imperialist movements elsewhere.
  • Keep the lessons of Keïta and Sankara in circulation, and connect the AES to the longer history of revolutionary Pan-Africanism.
  • Expose the CFA franc and treat full monetary sovereignty as a demand rather than a technical question.
  • Oppose military intervention in any form, and defend the right of Sahelian peoples to decide their own future.

The Sahel is one of the most active sites of anti-imperialist struggle in the world today. The AES is a moment in that struggle, not its conclusion, and it carries both the real gains of the break with French neocolonialism and the unfinished tasks of class emancipation.