From mediation to marginalisation: Multipolarity and the fragmentation of West African regional order

This article examines how the resurgence of great- and middle-power rivalries intersects with pre-existing governance and security crises to reshape Africa's regional conflict-management architecture after the 2020–2023 coups in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger. It asks why the capacity of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and the African Union (AU) to enforce regional political norms has weakened despite established anti-coup rules and enforcement mechanisms. Drawing on neorealist, critical-regionalist and postcolonial perspectives, and using a qualitative design that combines a structured comparison of five interconnected coup episodes with discourse analysis of 18 official texts, the article identifies a common mechanism. Multipolar competition widens access to alternative security, financial and diplomatic partnerships, reducing the material costs of resisting regional pressure; inconsistent enforcement, contested institutional credibility and sovereignty-centred legitimation reduce the political costs. Defection becomes more viable when both sets of costs decline. The Alliance of Sahel States (AES) is analysed as an institutional manifestation of this process. Its durability remains an open empirical question, contingent on institutionalisation, autonomous financing, collective-security performance, economic viability and sustained political cooperation.