ECOWAS applied pressure after a series of coups across the Sahel with the intent of upholding constitutional order and deterring further military seizures of power. The policy toolkit included border closures, freezes on financial transactions and assets, and threats to activate a standby force to restore civilian rule. Yet by early 2024 those measures had produced an unintended political outcome: stronger cohesion among the junta-led states and a widening geopolitical realignment away from the region’s traditional partners.
Sanctions quickly produced visible humanitarian and economic strain on affected populations. In Niger, for example, border closures and suspended transactions disrupted supply chains, undermined the distribution of food and medicine, and contributed to sharply higher prices for staples. The interruption of key utility services compounded the impact when Nigeria cut a large share of the electricity supply that most of Niger depended on. Those immediate costs made the sanctions salient in voters minds and provided the juntas with an easy narrative: external aggression against the nation rather than internal policy failure.
Rather than isolating coup leaders, the sanctions accelerated a political convergence among Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger. The three countries formalized security cooperation in a mutual defence pact in September 2023 and later signaled their willingness to separate from ECOWAS. That alignment reflected a calculated decision by the juntas to pool resources and political legitimacy in the face of regional punitive measures. The creation of that axis transformed what had been discrete domestic crises into a coordinated regional project.
A second strategic effect of the punitive approach was to push vulnerable governments into the orbit of external actors willing to provide security and political cover. Mali and other junta-led capitals embraced military contractors and closer links to Russian security networks as alternatives to Western partners. These arrangements offered short-term operational benefits to the militaries while raising long-term governance and sovereignty risks for the states involved. The presence of foreign mercenary actors, and the political symbolism of new security patrons, complicated ECOWAS efforts to mobilize unified diplomatic pressure.
Politically, sanctions hardened the domestic standing of some coup leaders. Faced with perceptible economic pain, many citizens read the punitive measures as collective punishment rather than a targeted accountability mechanism. That perception matters. Regimes that can claim they are resisting external coercion often consolidate support among nationalists, segments of the security apparatus, and communities exhausted by chronic insecurity. The result is a perverse incentive structure: a hardline response from the regional bloc can reward entrenchment, not reversal. Analytically, this is a classic sanction paradox - coercion that produces rallying effects rather than compliance.
Operationally, ECOWAS found itself constrained. Threats of military intervention were credible in public statements, and the bloc activated contingency planning for a standby force. But mobilising a multinational intervention in the Sahel presented high political and operational costs, and the prospect of force risked widening the confrontation into neighboring states that had sympathy for the coup governments. The combination of limited appetite for kinetic options and the real costs of economic measures placed ECOWAS in a narrow strategic bind.
By February 2024, ECOWAS began to reverse some punitive measures for humanitarian reasons while maintaining targeted restrictions on leaders themselves. That reversal acknowledged two inconvenient truths. First, blunt regional sanctions were inflicting damage on civilians and on regional infrastructure. Second, the sanctions had failed to produce the political outcomes ECOWAS sought, while creating an avenue for the juntas to pursue autonomy and alternative alliances. The policy lesson is stark: sanction design and sequencing matter as much as the political will to act.
What should ECOWAS and international partners do next? First, move from broad, economy-wide coercion to calibrated measures that target individual powerbrokers and their financial networks, while preserving the flow of humanitarian goods and commercial lifelines for ordinary people. Second, invest in instruments of positive leverage: negotiated security guarantees tied to measurable governance benchmarks, and regional incentives that lower the political payoff of alliance with external patron states. Third, rebuild a narrative of regional ownership of solutions. If populations see ECOWAS as a protector of livelihoods as well as constitutions, the bloc recovers legitimacy to mediate transitions rather than simply punish them.
The Sahel coups cascade is a turning point for West African regionalism. ECOWAS faces a choice: adapt its toolkit to realities on the ground and restore its role as a broker of durable stability, or continue a punitive approach that risks fragmenting the region and enlarging the space for external actors offering quick fixes. The longer the stalemate, the higher the chance that tactical security gains obtained by the juntas will ossify into strategic realignments that are difficult to reverse. For ECOWAS the immediate priority should be to convert coercion into credible pathways back to accountable governance, while protecting civilians from the fallout of regional rancor.