"Lebensraum¹⁰" or "Black Winter" - The Ibrahimian Doctrine Against the Neocolonial Assault Roch W. SANON - Jurist (German and French law), Germanist, Political Analyst of Africa/Europe Relations This independent research article, at the crossroads of geopolitics, international law, history and political sociology, offers a critical and thoroughly documented reading of the contemporary world that dominant narratives work methodically to render invisible. Through the prism of the Ibrahimian Revolution in Burkina Faso - and the Alliance of Sahel States (AES) it helped forge - the author develops a two-part reflection around a single thread: the reactivated concept of Lebensraum, that fierce and structurally organised neocolonial competition for the seizure of Sahelian resources (gold, uranium, land), which Captain Ibrahim Traoré names, with unflinching lucidity, the "black winter." What this document explores and reveals: The genealogy of democricide: how the West tolerates illegitimate regimes whenever they serve its interests, while sanctioning those who genuinely work for their peoples — with documented cases from Chad, Gabon, Côte d'Ivoire, Cameroon, Congo-Brazzaville, and Syrian leader Ahmed al-Sharaa whose UN sanctions were lifted in November 2025 after years of terrorist classification. The role of NGOs such as Human Rights Watch, whose investigative methods, contested methodology and presumed correspondence with the JNIM - a classified terrorist organisation - profoundly call into question their proclaimed neutrality and the use of such structures as instruments of sovereign destabilisation. A vertiginous historical dive into the post-war ratlines: the facilitated flight of Eichmann, Mengele and Barbie, the complicity of the Vatican, the Red Cross and Western intelligence services, Operations Paperclip and Osoaviakhim - and the question few dare to ask: what genuine change could the world have claimed, if the very architects of horror continued to structure its order? The question of the soldier as executor, not philosopher. Through the chilling case of Bila Tserkva (August 1941) - where approximately 90 Jewish children aged 4 to 7 were executed on the orders of Walter von Reichenau - the author interrogates the individual responsibility of the military man faced with technically lawful orders. This questioning is deepened through the figure of Lothar von Trotha (1848–1920), principal architect of the genocide of the Herero and Nama peoples in German South-West Africa, author of the infamous Vernichtungsbefehl - the extermination order: "Every Herero, whether bearing a rifle or not, whether in possession of cattle or not, will be shot. I spare neither women nor children." Von Trotha embodies in himself the abyssal gap between conventional military duty and extreme colonial brutality, well before the Nazi era. The author sees in this a striking mirror for analysing contemporary accusations levelled against Sahelian soldiers by organisations such as HRW - and asks the fundamental question: can one demand of a soldier in a war zone that he be a philosopher, when those sitting in judgement have never once come under fire? The predatory mechanics of the Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs): subsidised European chicken sold at €1.50/kg against €2.50 for local production, the Ivorian cocoa crisis triggered by imposed geo-localisation requirements, the destruction of African agricultural supply chains - a modern form of economic Lebensraum. The author further reveals a structurally staggering asymmetry: the European Union accepts paying high customs duties to an economic power such as the United States, whilst requiring African countries to open their markets with no tariff reciprocity whatsoever - depriving these states of crucial fiscal revenues amounting to as much as 2% of their GDP, whilst flooding local African supermarkets with subsidised European products - Belgian skimmed milk powder, cereals, poultry - sold at up to 50% below local production costs, systematically destroying agricultural sectors and livelihoods. The two original doctrines developed by the author over more than a decade: the Doctrine of Disconnection - analysing how the West, and France in particular, severed itself from African realities by maintaining subservient elites, opaque clubs and illegitimate regimes - and the Doctrine of Reconnection, proposing a path of rehabilitation grounded in mutual listening, decentralised cooperation and twinning arrangements, inspired by David Mitrany (A Working Peace System, 1946): it is not peoples who are in opposition, but logics of domination that prevent genuine cooperation. The author also identifies Canada as a partner of the future for Africa, precisely because it embodies a cooperative approach less encumbered by neocolonial reflexes. France's internal disconnection: the condition of the proletariat, the fiscal asphyxiation of households impoverished by industrial relocations to China, the absurdity of then taxing those same households on the cheap imports that result from those very relocations - and the state of urban transport, where an RER carriage designed for 60 passengers routinely carries triple that number, in breach of all norms, presented here as a future political flashpoint. The Ibrahimian Revolution analysed in its concrete achievements and its theory of the exploitation of time - the Bobo-Ouagadougou motorway, 685 urban buses, a record 94 tonnes of gold in 2025, cereal self-sufficiency, the Aeronautical Institute, mining reform, the Treasury Deposit Bank - presented not as a mere change of regime, but as an irreversible ideological, economic, pedagogical and generational rupture. The author analyses the convergence between Sankarism and Traoré's accelerated sovereigntist vision, transcended by the AES - a supranational structure that Sankara himself had been unable to bring to fruition - and extended by the Sonkoïst momentum in Senegal, demonstrating that endogenous sovereignty is not the preserve of any single type of regime. The awakening of African youth as a major geopolitical fact: adhesion rates of 80 to 90% in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger. This real-time over-informed generation compares its leaders, refuses the status of global sub-citizen and rejects local elites perceived as links in the chain of external predation - at a moment when RFI, BBC and the Voice of America have lost their information monopoly to social networks. Zersetzung - the psychological decomposition technique inherited from the East German Stasi - now applied to African sovereigntist leaders: blackmail, rumour, manipulation of the legal environment, international media lynching. The author devotes a dedicated work to this subject and documents how this reputation-destruction weapon is today targeting Ibrahim Traoré and Ousmane Sonko. The neurotechnological vulnerability of the American monocephalous regime - an unprecedented thesis on the risks of manipulating a hyper-concentrated executive in the age of nano-implants and neuro-hacking - alongside the convocation of Raymond Aron (Peace and War Among Nations, 1962) to recall that the egotism of national interests, far from being immoral, always prevails and justifies wars through a logic of strategic survival. The Iranian lesson for the AES: the primacy of collective teamwork over the individual, martial ingenuity in the diversification of warfare methods, and the investment of national revenues in science and human resources rather than opulence - the very opposite of the Arab monarchies which today sub-contract their own security sovereignty, illustrating at scale Solon's warning: "Satiety engenders excess." An unprecedented operational doctrine: the "Sahelisation of intelligence" - rethinking intelligence methods through the social and psychological sciences, transforming military personnel into farmers, shepherds, teachers or traders, recruiting among actors already embedded in the social fabric - and the creation of intelligence VDPs (Volunteers for the Defence of the Homeland) as force multipliers of security sovereignty. A reflection on the maturity of the African jurist: the author calls for moving beyond the repetition of imposed models to create genuinely original concepts and doctrines, to adapt law to endogenous sociological realities, and to stop conflating instruction with morality - recalling that European democracy stops at its own borders. This document is not suited to those who seek the comfort of established certainties. It is addressed to institutions, decision-makers, jurists, historians, analysts, risk assessors and all those who refuse imposed readings of the world - for, to invoke Hans Morgenthau (Politics Among Nations, 1948): a state has only interests, not moral responsibility. It is precisely this realism that this work places at the service of sovereign Africa.
Sanon et al. (Sat,) studied this question.
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