There’s No Conspiracy in the Sahel — There’s a Gap, and Bamako Knows How to Use It

A familiar claim keeps surfacing in the rhetoric of Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger’s ruling juntas, echoed enthusiastically by Russian state media: the West is deliberately working to destabilise the Sahel’s military governments. It’s a tidy story. It bundles sanctions, frozen aid and diplomatic isolation into a single narrative of conspiracy. But look closely at who is actually doing what, and what looks like a strategy of destabilisation turns out to be the side effect of something else entirely — and the chief beneficiary of the gap between intention and outcome is not some abstract “West” or abstract “Moscow”, but […] The post There’s No Conspiracy in the Sahel — There’s a Gap, and Bamako Knows How to Use It appeared first on African Arguments.