Post-Patronage Africa: A Conceptual Note

Version 1.1: revised formulation in Limitations section This working paper develops the framework of post-patronage Africa to capture a structural evolution in regime survival across fragile African states. Classical neopatrimonialism relied on internal distribution of rents to sustain elite coalitions. In high-threat environments — most starkly the central Sahel after the 2020–2023 coups — survival has been partially externalised. Regimes now depend heavily on access to critical external flows of security, finance, and diplomatic cover that they cannot generate domestically. Focusing on the Alliance of Sahel States (AES: Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger), the framework shows how Russia's Africa Corps (successor to Wagner), Turkey, China, and Gulf actors function as substitutes for collapsing internal patronage systems. Power shifts from resource possession to positional control over these flows. This generates three dynamics: aggressive multi-alignment that erodes exclusive loyalty, partial decoupling of physical presence from durable leverage, and geopolitical competition centred on infrastructural pipelines. Post-patronage Africa is patronage politics globalised for multipolar realities. External providers face a built-in structural disincentive to fully resolve the insecurity they manage: eliminating the threat would remove the very flow that sustains their positional leverage. The model offers short-term regime survival at the cost of entrenched fragility.