Operationalising the Liptako-Gourma charter: Alliance des États du Sahel Unified Force, sovereignty imaginaries and the (re)making of security order in Central Sahel

The launch of the Alliance des États du Sahel (AES) Unified Force by Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger marks one of the most consequential reconfigurations of regional security governance in West Africa since the collapse of the G5 Sahel. Framed by the region’s military regimes as a decisive turn towards sovereignty, self-reliance and collective defence, the Unified Force is both a political statement and an operational experiment unfolding at the epicentre of a rapidly intensifying jihadist insurgency. Drawing on media evidence, conflict event data and macroeconomic indicators, this article interrogates what the AES Unified Force meaningfully changes on the ground and what its emergence reveals about the evolving political economy of security in the central Sahel. It argues that while the force represents a genuine institutional departure from externally driven security architectures, it remains constrained by the same structural forces that undermined earlier initiatives: persistent cross-border insurgent mobility, rising civilian harm, fiscal fragility and growing regional isolation following withdrawal from the Economic Community of West African States. The analysis further shows that militarised sovereignty, absent sustained cooperation with neighbouring coastal states and broader regional frameworks, risks deepening rather than resolving insecurity.