Democracy Under Siege: Military Coups and Shrinking Civic Space in the Sahel
Sahel Leadership; Captain Ibrahim Traore (Burkina Faso), General Assimi Goita (Mali), General Abdourahamane Tchiani (Niger) and General Mamdy Doumbouya © MFWA
Mapping shrinking civic space in West Africa’s military-led States - Part 1
By the Media Foundation for West Africa, published on 8th July 2025
The Sahel region is undergoing a democracy crisis. Since 2020, a wave of military coups has installed junta regimes in Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger, all of which now operate with minimal constitutional oversight.
In these countries, restrictions on fundamental rights, particularly freedom of expression, access to information, and freedom of assembly, have become systematic thereby shrinking the civic space. These trends, while country-specific in their expression, have the potential to become regional in scale and scope when unaddressed.
As part of efforts to monitor, highlight and respond to these trends, we are launching This Week in the Sahel, a weekly digest that offers updates and analyses drawn from our ongoing freedom of expression monitoring and advocacy work in West Africa.
The newsletter will track developments in Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger as well as Guinea, which, although not part of the Sahel geographically, is a military-led state and presently shares similar political characteristics with the Sahel States. It will also seek to mobilise stakeholders to demand accountability for the repression in these States.
The urgency of this weekly digest is clear. In Burkina Faso, recent months have seen the abduction of journalists only for them to resurface as conscripts deployed to conflict zones and the dissolution of the professional association of journalists by the junta.
In Mali, a journalist was arrested for criticising the Minister of Justice and the judiciary, political parties have been dissolved, and an international broadcaster has been suspended over alleged bias in protest coverage.
In Niger, journalists have been detained over reporting on a purported national security issue and citizens have been arrested for criticising their regional governor in a WhatsApp group.
In Guinea, a former National Transitional Council member was abducted from his home and brutally assaulted, and a media outlet have been suspended by the media regulator in a move considered disproportionate and highly irregular.
We invite journalists, researchers, civil society actors, and policymakers to engage with This Week in the Sahel as a resource and an early-warning mechanism, and work with us to achieve the vital goal of building a freer, more democratic West Africa.
