New Books in Political Science Nina Wilén, "Securitizing the Sahel: Analyzing External Interventions and Their Consequences" (Oxford UP, 2025)
Nov 25, 2025
Nina Wilen, Africa director at the Egmont Royal Institute and associate professor at Lund University, dives into her expertise on security and peacebuilding. She discusses the motivations behind external interventions in the Sahel, the dynamics between military missions, and the challenges of intelligence sharing. Wilen highlights how security assistance has shifted local power balances, potentially leading to instability and coup contagion. Her insights reveal the geopolitical complexities that shape contemporary security policies in the region.
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Multiple Overlapping Missions
- External interventions in the Sahel included UN, EU, and multiple bilateral missions with overlapping mandates.
- Nina Wilen shows these varied missions aimed to combine military, civilian, and diplomatic tools in one theatre.
Embedded With Troops On The Ground
- Wilen embedded with Belgian special forces and French units to observe training and daily life in Niger and Mali.
- She used participant observation to capture bottom-up perspectives of security force assistance.
How The Sahel Became A Security Priority
- The securitization framing rose in the 2000s as Western strategies shifted toward terrorism and weak states as threats.
- Events like Libya's collapse and kidnappings amplified global attention and justified interventions.
