What are the AES countries?
The AES, short for Alliance des États du Sahel (Alliance of Sahel States), is a three-country confederation made up of Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger.
All three were formed into an alliance after each had experienced military coups in the early 2020s and come to be ruled by military juntas. The founding document they signed is known as the Liptako-Gourma Charter, named for the cross-border region of West Africa where the three countries meet.
All three are landlocked, all sit primarily within the Sahel States climate band south of the Sahara Desert, and all face the same set of physical and economic constraints: chronic water scarcity, recurrent drought, advancing desertification, and food-system fragility.
Why they broke away
The trio repeatedly explained their joint action as a response to what they saw as the failure of the African Union and ECOWAS (the Economic Community of West African States, the main regional bloc) to provide adequate support against jihadist insurgencies, the imposition of what they called illegal sanctions, and what they described as undue foreign influence, particularly from France.
Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger withdrew from the African Union and ECOWAS and created the AES as their own sub-regional bloc.
Where they are headed
The AES is a collective defense bloc aimed at countering any military intervention or external threat, including terrorism, with an ambition of economic integration. The trio aims to create an economic and monetary union as well as their own currency, to be based on the natural resources of the member countries. Chad sent a delegation to Mali to discuss possible AES membership but has not formally joined.
The AES sits at the center of one of the most consequential geopolitical shifts in West Africa in decades, three desperately poor, landlocked countries betting that solidarity and a clean break from old power structures will do what decades of the old arrangement could not.
Follow-ups
What is Sahel?
The Sahel is a vast semi-arid belt that runs across Africa just south of the Sahara Desert, stretching from the Atlantic coast in the west all the way to the Red Sea in the east.
The name comes from the Arabic word for "shore" or "edge," treating the Sahara Desert as an ocean and the Sahel States as the coastline where the desert gives way to something more alive. It covers parts of more than a dozen countries, including Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Chad, Sudan, and Eritrea, among others.
The climate sits in a narrow band between desert and savanna. Rainfall comes in a single short season and is unreliable year to year. That unpredictability is not a minor inconvenience: when the rains fail or arrive late, crops fail with them, livestock die, and communities that have no buffer run short of food quickly. The land itself is fragile. Overgrazing, drought, and rising temperatures push the desert southward through a process called desertification, meaning the Sahara is literally advancing into land that was once farmable.
Why it matters for the AES
All three Alliance of Sahel States countries, Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger, sit squarely in this belt, which explains a great deal about the pressures they share. Food insecurity, scarce water, and competition over shrinking productive land are not policy failures unique to their governments. They are physical facts of the geography. Jihadist groups have exploited exactly that instability, moving through ungoverned stretches of semi-arid terrain where state presence was already thin before the insurgencies began.
The Sahel is also one of the fastest-warming regions on earth. What is already hard gets harder as temperatures rise, which is part of why the humanitarian situation across the belt has drawn sustained attention from international bodies, even as the AES All governments have moved to limit outside involvement in their affairs.
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