USR PUBLISHER

Between 2014 and 2025, the Sahel region underwent one of the most consequential geopolitical realignments in post-Cold War African international relations. This paper examines how the deployment of the Russian private military company known as the Wagner Group, its state-controlled successor Africa Corps, and the parallel decline of French military and economic influence have shaped the foreign policy behaviour of Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, three states that have historically presented themselves as non-aligned or sovereignty-seeking actors within the international system. The study is guided by three objectives: to conceptualize the core constructs of Wagner-style private military activity, non-alignment, and great-power competition as they apply to the Sahel; to examine the empirical trajectory of Russian and French engagement in the region from the beginning of the Malian insurgency in 2012–2014 through the consolidation of the Alliance of Sahel States (AES) in 2023–2025; and to assess the extent to which the region's declared posture of sovereignty and non-alignment is empirically sustained or undermined by dependency on Russian security guarantees. Employing a qualitative, documentary research design anchored in thematic content analysis of policy reports, human-rights investigations, and scholarly literature, the paper is theorized through a tripartite framework combining Kwame Nkrumah's theory of neocolonialism, structural/neorealist great-power competition theory, and the Active Non-Alignment (ANA) framework. Findings indicate that while the Sahelian juntas have successfully diversified away from exclusive French dependency, their reliance on Wagner/Africa Corps for regime survival, combined with well-documented human-rights abuses such as the Moura massacre, and resource-based leverage over uranium and gold, suggests that the region's non-alignment is best understood as a rhetorical and partially achieved strategic posture rather than a fully realized condition of policy autonomy. The paper concludes that non-alignment in the contemporary Sahel functions less as neutrality between blocs and more as a contested, asymmetric hedging strategy, and it identifies limitations related to data access, security constraints on primary fieldwork, and the fluid, rapidly evolving nature of the subject matter.