Foreign Military Presence in West Africa: How France, Russia, and the U.S. Are Redefining Regional Security Alignments

Eneasato Onyekachi Benjamin

Department of Political Science Enugu State University of Science and Technology, Enugu State, Nigeria

ABSTRACT

This paper examines how foreign military presence in West Africa is being transformed from a Western-led, counterterrorism-centered framework into a contested, multipolar security arena shaped by coups, legitimacy crises, and great-power competition. It traces how military takeovers in Mali (2020), Burkina Faso (2022), and Niger (2023) accelerated the rejection of French interventionism and exposed the political fragility of U.S. cooperation built on elite consent. It then analyzes Russia’s expanding role often framed as sovereignty-respecting and low-conditionality delivered through hybrid state/contractor structures and aligned with regime-security priorities. Using a security-alignment lens, the paper compares the three external models (France’s direct intervention, Russia’s transactional support, and the U.S.’s low-visibility offshore balancing) and assesses their implications for legitimacy, counterinsurgency effectiveness, and regional order. It concludes that West African states are increasingly leveraging multipolarity to diversify partners and enhance bargaining power, but at the cost of fragmented counterterrorism coordination, weakened ECOWAS credibility, and heightened risks of instability and proxy competition.

Keywords: Foreign military presence, West Africa, Sahel, security alignment, multipolarity, coups; sovereignty, France, Operation Barkhane

CITE AS: Eneasato Onyekachi Benjamin (2026). Foreign Military Presence in West Africa: How France, Russia, and the U.S. Are Redefining Regional Security Alignments. INOSR ARTS AND HUMANITIES 12(1):29-42. https://doi.org/10.59298/INOSRAH/2026/1212942