The Sahel As an Unintended Region - Competing Regionalisms and Insecurity Dynamics

The Sahel is now understood as part of the North-western Africa regional complex, a territory where space and borders are defined by common security dynamics and shared institutional characteristics. This illusory consensus was only reached in recent years, and hides the underlying competing processes of regional formation which involved several players, most notably the EU. The current contours of the Sahel were delineated at the beginning of the 2000s, as a product of international, regional and local dynamics. In this context, various actors activated different regional projects in the attempt to reframe the area according to their interests, ideas and identities. Starting from said cognitive, normative and material struggles the paper identifies three key regionalizing actors which have sought to implement competing ideas of the region: (1) the external security deliverers - the US, the EU and France - focusing on regional weaknesses and security threats; (2) external transnational actors such as criminal and terrorist groups attempting to exploit the fading frontiers of this “empty” region; and (3) local ruling elites trying to exploit the external engagement in the area. In seeking to unpack the EU's impact in the Sahel, the paper has a twofold purpose. On the one hand, considering the creation of a region is understood as a political act, it critically disentangles the competing regionalist project at work in the area. On the other hand, it will underline the effects caused by the complex interaction between these different regionalizing attempts, on regional stability and security.