Dakar Forum 2026: A Decade Defined by Strategic Rupture in the Sahel

Sovereignty, Regional Recomposition, and the Search for an African Security Doctrine

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The tenth edition of the International Forum on Peace and Security in Africa, held on April 20 and 21, 2026, at the Abdou Diouf International Conference Centre in Diamniadio, Senegal, convened against the backdrop of the most consequential geopolitical realignment the continent has witnessed in a generation. After a two-year interruption, the forum's return carries symbolic and substantive weight in equal measure. Presided over by Senegalese Head of State Bassirou Diomaye Faye and attended by more than 700 participants from 60 countries — including heads of state, ministers, senior military officers, diplomats, and analysts — the event signals both the continued relevance of Dakar as a continental security forum and the depth of the structural transformations underway across the Sahel and West Africa more broadly.

The forum's thematic framing — Africa Confronting the Challenges of Stability, Integration, and Sovereignty: What Durable Solutions? — reflects not a programmatic aspiration but an acute diagnostic. The continent is navigating the simultaneous dissolution of inherited security architectures, the expansion of jihadist insurgencies into coastal states, the fragmentation of regional institutions, and an intensifying competition among external powers for strategic positioning across African territory. The Dakar Forum, in its tenth year, finds itself at the intersection of all these pressures.

STRATEGIC CONTEXT

A Decade of Compounding Structural Disruption

When the Dakar Forum was established in 2013 under then-President Macky Sall, the Sahel security environment, while already challenging, retained a degree of institutional coherence anchored in multilateral frameworks, bilateral security partnerships with Western powers, and an ECOWAS architecture that commanded broad regional legitimacy. Ten years later, that landscape has been fundamentally altered. The dissolution of the G5 Sahel, an institution that represented one of the most ambitious indigenous attempts to construct a regional counterterrorism framework, removed a critical coordination mechanism at precisely the moment when operational requirements were intensifying. Its collapse was not incidental — it reflected the deeper erosion of the political consensus on which joint security governance depends.

The fractures within ECOWAS have compounded this institutional deterioration. The withdrawal of Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger from the regional body — three states collectively experiencing active jihadist insurgencies, military governance, and a deliberate reorientation away from Western security partnerships — has introduced a structural fault line into West African regionalism that will not be easily repaired. These withdrawals are not simply diplomatic disagreements. They represent a rupture in the normative and operational foundations of collective security in the subregion, with consequences that extend well beyond the three states directly involved.

Simultaneously, the geographic expansion of jihadist violence toward the coastal states of the Gulf of Guinea — Benin, Togo, Côte d'Ivoire, and Ghana — has introduced a new frontier of instability that these states are structurally and institutionally less prepared to absorb. The Sahel crisis, long framed as a landlocked phenomenon, is becoming a coastal one. This shift fundamentally alters the strategic calculus of the region's more stable economies and of the international actors invested in their security.

SOVEREIGNTY AND THE REDEFINITION OF SECURITY PARTNERSHIPS

The Sovereign Turn in West African Security Discourse

The defining political undercurrent of the 2026 Dakar Forum is the consolidation of a pro-sovereignty orientation in African security discourse — not as an ideological posture but as an operational preference with concrete institutional implications. President Faye's opening remarks set this tone with deliberate clarity, calling for an African repossession of the security agenda and denouncing the persistent dependency on external frameworks and interests that have shaped — and, in the assessment of many African governments, constrained — continental security responses for decades.

This is not a new argument. Calls for African solutions to African problems have featured in continental security discourse since the founding of the African Union's Peace and Security Architecture. What is new, however, is the political weight behind the position and the degree to which it now commands alignment across multiple capitals that were previously more accommodating of Western-led security frameworks. The Malian, Burkinabé, and Nigerien transitions have accelerated this shift by demonstrating that departing from established partnership models carries manageable short-term costs — a demonstration effect that other governments are observing carefully.

In Ouagadougou, the call for strategic autonomy resonates with particular intensity given the sustained and escalating security pressure the country faces. In Abidjan, anxieties focus more specifically on the northward advance of jihadist networks toward zones with significant economic stakes. In Dakar itself, the dominant framing is one of institutional maturity — a continental readiness to assume fuller ownership of security architecture design. These are not identical positions, but they converge on a shared rejection of externally designed and externally managed security solutions.

The pro-sovereignty turn in West African security discourse is not merely rhetorical. It is reshaping partnership preferences, restructuring access negotiations for military basing and training, and reordering the institutional landscape through which security cooperation is channelled. Decision-makers operating in this environment require real-time visibility on how these preferences are translating into operational changes at the national and subregional level.

THEMATIC DIMENSIONS

Natural Resources, Critical Minerals, and the Geopolitics of Extraction

The question of Africa's natural resource endowment occupied a central position in the forum's substantive deliberations, and with good reason. The continent holds an estimated 30 percent of the world's critical mineral reserves — resources indispensable to the global energy transition and to the advanced manufacturing sectors that define contemporary economic competition. This endowment is increasingly recognised not merely as an economic asset but as a strategic variable in the reconfiguration of great-power competition on the continent. Yet the persistent structural reality is that Africa remains marginalised from the transformation and valorisation of these resources, capturing disproportionately little of the value generated from their extraction.

This asymmetry is a direct driver of geopolitical competition and, in several contexts, of conflict dynamics. The scramble for positioning among both traditional Western powers and emerging actors — Russia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and China — is intensifying across resource-rich corridors that frequently overlap with zones of active insecurity. The relationship between mineral wealth and conflict is not deterministic, but it is structural: where governance of resource revenues is weak, where extraction agreements are opaque, and where the benefits of resource wealth do not reach affected communities, the conditions for armed mobilisation and political destabilisation are reliably reproduced.

Cybersecurity and the Emerging Digital Threat Landscape

The forum's parallel workstreams on cybersecurity addressed a dimension of African security that is expanding rapidly and is underserved by existing analytical and institutional frameworks. African states face accelerating exposure to cyber threats — state-sponsored intrusions, infrastructure attacks, disinformation campaigns, and the exploitation of digital financial systems — at a moment when national cybersecurity capacities remain limited and regional coordination mechanisms are nascent. The intersection of digital vulnerability with broader conflict dynamics, including the use of social media for armed group recruitment and the targeting of electoral processes, represents a threat vector that is insufficiently integrated into continental security planning.

Regional Integration: Architecture Under Stress

The forum's second major plenary examined regional integration as both a potential lever of collective security and a potential constraint on national autonomy — a tension that the current ECOWAS crisis has brought into particularly sharp relief. The ECOWAS architecture, in its current form, faces three compounding structural limitations that the forum's discussions did not resolve but did examine with unusual candour: mandates that lack the operational clarity necessary for effective deployment, financing structures that create dependency on external donors and produce chronic resource instability, and operational capacities that remain insufficient for the scale and character of threats the subregion faces. President Faye's remarks on these limitations were direct, reflecting a broader consensus among participating governments that the reform of regional security institutions is a strategic necessity rather than a technical adjustment.

THE EXTERNAL ACTOR DIMENSION

A Reconfigured Competitive Landscape

The composition of participants at the 2026 Dakar Forum was itself analytically instructive. The presence of representatives from the Alliance of Sahel States alongside American officials and European diplomats illustrated the degree to which the African security environment is now defined by the simultaneous engagement of actors with competing strategic interests and incompatible frameworks for security partnership. Russia's expanding military footprint across the Sahel, sustained through private military contractors and bilateral agreements with transitional governments, represents the most visible expression of this reconfiguration, but it is not the only one. Turkey's security presence across North and West Africa is growing through a combination of drone technology transfers, training agreements, and diplomatic engagement. The UAE's investment in security relationships across the Sahel and Horn of Africa is increasingly consequential. China's role, while primarily economic, has direct security implications through its influence over critical infrastructure and communications systems.

The management of this competitive landscape — navigating among external actors with divergent interests while maintaining strategic agency — represents one of the central political challenges facing African governments. The Dakar Forum provided a space in which these tensions were acknowledged, but the forum's design does not lend itself to the production of definitive positions on partnership preferences. What it does reveal, consistently and usefully, is the direction of travel: toward diversified partnerships, reduced institutional dependency on any single external actor, and a stronger insistence on African agency in the design of security cooperation arrangements.

THE TERRORISM DATA AND THE SCALE OF THE CHALLENGE

A Tenfold Increase in Sahel Terrorist Violence Since 2007

The empirical baseline for the forum's discussions is unambiguous and deeply concerning. According to the Global Terrorism Index 2026, the number of deaths attributable to terrorism in the Sahel has increased tenfold since 2007, establishing the region as one of the global epicentres of extremist violence. Four West African states now rank among the most severely affected countries worldwide by terrorist activity. This trajectory is not the product of a single cause or a temporary escalation — it reflects the accumulated effect of governance failures, the collapse of traditional community conflict resolution mechanisms, the proliferation of weapons, demographic pressures, and the adaptive organisational capacity of armed groups that have proven highly responsive to changing operational environments.

The scale of this challenge is not matched by the resources, institutional coherence, or strategic coordination currently available to address it. This mismatch is the central operational problem that the Dakar Forum confronts — and that it has not yet resolved, despite a decade of deliberation. The forum's value lies not in producing solutions to problems of this structural depth, but in generating the shared analytical frameworks and political alignments that are preconditions for solution design.

TOWARD AN AFRICAN SECURITY DOCTRINE

From Diagnosis to Operational Architecture

The most substantive ambition articulated at the 2026 Dakar Forum is the development of an African security doctrine capable of translating political and analytical convergence into operational institutional arrangements. President Faye's framing of the forum as a moment of 'maturity and action' reflects an awareness that a decade of diagnosis has not yet produced the institutional transformation the security environment demands. The concrete policy directions emerging from the forum's deliberations point toward several distinct operational priorities.

The first is the effective operationalisation of standby forces within existing regional security frameworks — moving from declarations of capability to deployable capacity with clear mandates, reliable financing, and command structures capable of functioning under political stress. The second is a serious engagement with the governance of natural resource revenues as a security instrument, recognising that transparency in extraction agreements and equitable distribution of resource benefits directly reduce the conditions in which armed mobilisation becomes rational for affected communities. The third is a strategic investment in youth — an intervention that operates across multiple timescales, addressing immediate vulnerabilities to armed group recruitment while building the human capital foundation for longer-term economic stabilisation.

Each of these priorities has been articulated before. What the 2026 forum adds is a degree of political ownership and urgency that earlier editions lacked, shaped by the accumulated experience of a decade in which the costs of inaction have become undeniably visible.

ASSESSMENT AND OUTLOOK

A Pivotal Moment in Continental Security Architecture

The tenth Dakar Forum marks a genuine inflection point in African security discourse, though the translation of that inflection into durable institutional and operational change remains uncertain. The convergence of pressures — the collapse of inherited security frameworks, the geographic expansion of jihadist violence, the intensification of external competition over African strategic assets, and the consolidation of a sovereignist political preference across multiple West African governments — creates both the necessity and the political conditions for structural reform. Whether those conditions will be converted into operational outcomes depends on factors that the forum itself cannot control: the sustainability of political will in governments under acute security pressure, the capacity of regional institutions to absorb reform without fracturing further, and the degree to which external actors choose to support African agency rather than compete with it.

What the forum has demonstrated, across ten editions and the most turbulent decade in postcolonial West African security history, is that the space for sustained, high-level, multi-actor deliberation on African security has both maintained its relevance and deepened its analytical seriousness. That is not a trivial achievement in an environment as volatile and rapidly changing as the one the participants gathered to address.

The Sahel and West Africa are entering a phase in which the gap between the scale of security challenges and the operational capacity available to address them is widening rather than narrowing. Monitoring the dynamics that determine whether that gap can be closed — the political alignments, the institutional reforms, the partnership reconfiguration, the resource governance shifts — requires continuous, independent, and field-informed analytical capacity that official reporting structures cannot reliably provide.

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