How Europeans can help stabilise the Sahel

– , Berlin time (CEST, UTC+2)
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Guests

Emanuela Del Re, EU Special Representative for the Sahel

Tiéman Coulibaly, Former Minister of Defense/Foreign Affairs, Mali

Will Brown, Senior Policy Fellow, Africa Programme, ECFR

Chaired by

Julien Barnes-Dacey, Director, Africa and MENA Programmes, ECFR

A decade of military, humanitarian, and developmental European interventions in the Sahelian states of Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger have failed comprehensively. Yet, European governments must accept that engagement, however ugly, is their only hope of advancing their strategic priority of a stable Sahel region. In this event, ECFR Africa reflects on recent developments and discusses avenues of European engagement in the region.

The public discussion marks the launch of the new policy brief Aligned in the sand: How Europeans can help stabilise the Sahel, authored by Brown, which assesses the combination of failures in the Sahel, Russian disinformation campaigns, and the competing pressures of wars in Gaza and Ukraine, that have pushed European states in different directions, significantly harming prospects for a more impactful, coherent approach. With Burkina Faso on the verge of complete collapse and a growing likelihood that Ghana will be dragged into the conflict the discussion could not be timelier.