A Borderless Insurgency, a Divided Response: The ECOWAS–AES Security Dilemma

Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger's withdrawal from ECOWAS, and their construction of a rival security framework under the Alliance of Sahel States (AES), has produced a troubling paradox just as the insurgency's geography expands toward the coast. The three juntas have compounded that paradox by turning to Russia and its mercenary formations, first Wagner and now the state-run Africa Corps, as their principal security guarantor, trading regional partnership for a patron with no border in West Africa, no seat at ECOWAS and no proven record of containing the threat. For Jama'at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM) and allied groups, there is no AES border and no ECOWAS border. There is only territory to penetrate and communities to influence. As the threat becomes more regional, the mechanisms for confronting it are becoming more divided, and Moscow's growing footprint is deepening rather than resolving that divide, a fact that should concern Accra as much as Abuja or Niamey.

Jihadists move through a cross-border environment rather than within a single state. ACLED research shows JNIM expanding into northern Benin, particularly around the W-Arly-Pendjari complex spanning Benin, Burkina Faso and Niger. The terrain and thin state presence make the area hard to hold. A border difficult for a military to cross is often easier for an insurgent network to slip through, because a state must respect sovereignty and a militant need not. Burkina Faso's forces may pursue militants to their own frontier, but cannot follow them into Benin without authorisation.

The Burkina Faso–Benin–Togo borderlands also contain trading and kinship networks predating the modern state. A herder crossing to trade livestock attracts no attention, but a militant moving through the same channels can exploit that familiarity. The border becomes a social network as much as a physical one, a gap that widens when relations between neighbouring capitals sour.

This is no longer a purely Sahelian story. JNIM's push has already reached Benin and Togo, and Ghanaian security officials have repeatedly flagged militant reconnaissance and recruitment activity along the northern frontier with Burkina Faso. The Africa Center for Strategic Studies records militant Islamist-linked fatalities in north-western Nigeria rising from zero in 2024 to 136 in 2025 and 506 in 2026, a 268 per cent jump in a single year, as JNIM and Islamic State Sahel Province appear to collaborate with Boko Haram's Sadiku faction, Ansaru, Lakurawa and assorted criminal groups. That is the transition from a Sahelian insurgency to a West African one, and coastal states from Ghana to Togo sit directly in its path. It is a spread that Russian-backed forces, thinly deployed and focused on holding capitals rather than contesting rural borderlands, are poorly positioned to check.

The deeper issue is coordination across political, military and intelligence systems, and ECOWAS has acknowledged as much. Its July 2026 communiqué described the regional security situation as deteriorating and directed leadership to engage AES states on a "pragmatic security cooperation mechanism." Containing terrorism depends on knowing where militants are, who commands them and where attacks are being planned, information that must move quickly across borders.

But the AES breakaway complicates that. Niger and Nigeria share a long, vital border yet sit in different blocs; intelligence sharing now leans more on bilateral goodwill than on a common regional mechanism. A 2026 Institute for Security Studies analysis argues the ECOWAS–AES fragmentation weakens collective security and recommends restoring direct contact between the two blocs' general staffs. Russia is no substitute for that channel. Moscow sits outside every regional early-warning system ECOWAS has built, including the frameworks Ghana, Togo and Benin actually rely on, so intelligence gathered by AES-aligned forces has no automatic route into them.

Early warning depends on information moving fast: a tip from northern Burkina Faso could prevent an attack in Benin, just as intelligence from Niger could help Nigeria anticipate militant movement. But when JNIM fighters flee a Burkinabè operation toward Benin, pursuit cannot simply continue across the line. The militants gain a tactical advantage at the border itself, an advantage that hot-pursuit and cross-border agreements could close, but that a Moscow-oriented security architecture, answerable to Russia rather than any regional body, has no mandate to broker.

Beyond the military mechanics lies a diplomatic obstacle. The AES accuses ECOWAS of interfering in domestic affairs and using sanctions as pressure; ECOWAS defends constitutional governance as non-negotiable. Terrorism is indifferent to which narrative prevails, and the mistrust that pushed the AES from ECOWAS also makes cooperation against militancy harder.

This is where dependence on Russia turns autonomy into isolation. Since Wagner's dissolution after Prigozhin's 2023 death, Russian deployments in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger have been absorbed into the Ministry of Defence's Africa Corps, a leaner but by most independent accounts no more effective force. West Point's Combating Terrorism Center and other analysts find little evidence the transition improved outcomes, and JNIM inflicted some of the juntas' heaviest losses around the handover. Africa Corps garrisons in Niger and Burkina Faso number only in the low hundreds, a fraction of what securing that territory demands, while allegations of atrocities against civilians, including proceedings before the African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights, continue to mount. A security partnership built on a discredited mercenary outfit's state-run successor does not project regional legitimacy; it substitutes firepower for trust, at the exact moment trust is what a transnational campaign most requires.

The AES's search for autonomy has grown more costly as the threat it faces has grown more transnational, and dependence on Moscow does not offset that isolation so much as formalise it. Militants are becoming more regionally integrated precisely as the states fighting them, and the external patrons they have chosen, grow more divided. For Ghana and its coastal neighbours, that divide is no longer a distant Sahelian concern. It is arriving at their own borders.

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 protected]