Excerpts The coup in August 2020 was welcomed by a population tired of the corruption and incompetence of Ibrahim Boubacar Keita’s government. But the new regime grew increasingly hardline and eventually banned political parties in May 2025. Most opposition figures are now in exile, notably the imam Mahmoud Dicko, who leads from Algiers the Coalition of Forces for the Republic, set up in December 2025, and the communist Oumar Mariko, president of the now dissolved African Solidarity for Democracy and Independence party, who tried unsuccessfully to mediate with JNIM to secure the release of 17 hostages in March 2026. Even so, the regime still retains some popular support. ‘The jihadists have failed to stir up the population as they’d hoped,’ says Senegalese journalist Abdou Khadre Cissé. Spending on military equipment and security is draining state finances, prompting new taxes on mobile phone top-ups and money transfers via phone. In jihadist-dominated areas, people endure rackete...
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51