- In this Q&A, Crisis Group expert Nnamdi Obasi assesses the import of these events for West Africa’s security architecture and Nigeria’s influence therein.
A string of coups in the central Sahel continues to reverberate in West Africa.
On 28 January, Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger – where military officers seized power in a series of putsches beginning in 2021 – announced that they were exiting the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), a regional development body created by the Treaty of Lagos in 1975.
ECOWAS is a