In 2012, nomadic miners discovered a vast surface gold deposit in the Jebel Amir region of northern Darfur, Sudan. Within months, tens of thousands of artisanal miners had flooded into the area, and the site generated extraordinary wealth in one of Sudan’s most marginal and conflict-prone regions. By early 2013, control over the deposit had become entangled in a violent struggle among tribal militias, commercial intermediaries and the Sudanese state itself.
Although not fully understood at the time, the Jebel Amir discovery marked the eastern trigger point of a wider, vast Saharan gold belt stretching from Sudan to the arid deserts of north-western Mauritania. Over the following years, deposits were identified in Chad’s Batha and Tibesti regions and Niger’s Djado Plateau, Tchibarakaten district, and Aïr massif. Experienced miners, traders and transporters moved along ancient trans-Saharan commercial and migratory networks in search of gold, often along territories where state authority was weak, contested or wholly absent.
By 2016, the Sahelian gold rush had reached Mali, a vast landlocked country in West Africa. While southern and western Mali had long practised artisanal panning in areas such as Kayes, Sikasso and Koulikoro, the latest gold rush reached far into the country’s arid north. Compared to southern Mali, which hosts the majority of the population and the nation’s capital, Bamako, northern Mali had long been defined by limited state presence and chronic underdevelopment. Kidal in particular had long stood at the centre of a Tuareg insurgency seeking autonomy from the wider Azawad region, while parts of Gao and Timbuktu were marked by overlapping separatist and criminal groups.
Several jihadist groups, such as al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), Ansar Dine and the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa (MUJAO), operated alongside these separatist factions. These groups often embedded themselves within local social and economic structures, effectively combining ideologically motivated insurgencies with informal governance. When the gold rush flooded into this landscape in 2016, it entered an already fractured geography filled with actors positioned to monetise disorder.
While much of Mali’s instability remained concentrated in the north, the institutional foundations of its southern democracy had also come under increasing strain. A country once celebrated as a democratic success story in West Africa had seen a growing number of coups and, eventually, the reassertion of military rule. Amadou Toumani Touré, elected in 2002 and again in 2007, presided over a formally competitive multiparty order but one increasingly weakened by executive dominance and a deteriorating security environment. He was overthrown in the 2012 coup led by Captain Amadou Sanogo amid anger over the state’s handling of the northern rebellion.
After a transitional period and French military intervention, Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta was elected president in 2013 and re-elected in 2018, but his rule was steadily undermined by insecurity and allegations of corruption. In August 2020, he, too, was removed by officers led by Colonel Assimi Goïta, who initially installed a civilian-led transitional arrangement before ousting its leadership in a second coup in May 2021 and consolidating military rule.
These successive coups and the return of military governance make Mali appear at first glance to fit neatly within a familiar narrative of democratic backsliding. However, this overstates the version of democracy from which the country supposedly deteriorated. Mali’s pre-coup political order combined several outward forms of democracy, including regular multi-party elections, a constitutional order, accompanying institutions, a formal separation of powers, and an international reputation as a “model democracy” in West Africa. The problem was not that Mali lacked the outward characteristics of a democracy, but that its institutions were never truly territorially embedded and that the civilian experience of representation was far thinner in practice.
In the country’s north, large areas lie effectively beyond sustained state control, with Tuareg rebellions recurring since the 1960s and governance often mediated through informal arrangements or negotiated autonomy. Meanwhile, in the south, democratic practice was undermined by executive dominance and deeply entrenched patronage networks. The erosion of Mali’s democracy since 2012 is less a case of backsliding and more the unravelling of a shallow constitutional order whose fragility was exposed by the political economy of the Sahelian gold rush.
After seizing power in August 2020, the junta moved quickly to recast Mali’s crisis in sovereignist terms, with gold quickly becoming central to the government’s security model. Mali is the third-largest gold producer in Africa, and under military rule, the country’s mineral wealth increasingly became part of a broader resource-security exchange. As relations with France deteriorated and the UN peacekeeping mission departed, Mali turned to an alternative security patron.
Personnel affiliated with Russia’s Wagner Group began arriving in late 2021, officially presented as trainers supporting the Malian armed forces. In practice, they became deeply embedded in regime protection and force projection in contested areas in central and northern Mali. In exchange, the state offered up lucrative concessions in sectors tied to gold mining, transport corridors and processing infrastructure. The junta financed and legitimised its harder security posture in the short term, albeit by tying regime survival ever more closely to external partners whose leverage extended into the political economy of gold itself.
Africa offers up many examples of how natural resources fail to strengthen fragile states. By contrast, in regions where public authority is weak, resources tend to empower whoever controls access, movement, protection, and taxation. When the Sahelian gold rush spread across the central Sahel, artisanal production became a multi-billion-dollar informal sector, with much of the proceeds funnelled through clandestine channels. In Kidal, rebel groups tied to the Coordination of Azawad Movements taxed miners in exchange for security.
Elsewhere, jihadist groups levied religious taxes and reopened shuttered mines to continue operations. These groups controlled entry to sites, secured transit routes, and linked local extraction proceeds to larger smuggling networks. Gold moved easily across the Sahel’s porous borders and was then laundered through regional trading hubs. This transformed artisanal mining into a lucrative, resilient source of financing that further entrenched these armed groups in Mali’s fragmented governing order.
In northern Mali, the most consequential beneficiary of this fragmented order has been Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin, or JNIM. Formed in March 2017 under the leadership of Iyad ag Ghali, JNIM emerged from the merger of several jihadist factions and has since become the dominant militant coalition in the central Sahel. While JNIM initially formed to counter heavy French military pressure and neutralise the rising regional threat of the Islamic State, the Sahelian gold rush became the primary economic engine that funded and accelerated JNIM’s subsequent territorial expansion across the Sahel.
In Mali, JNIM’s strongest footholds are concentrated across the northern regions of Kidal, Gao and Timbuktu, as well as central Mali’s Mopti region, from where it has expanded southward into parts of Ségou and Koulikoro. JNIM is often mischaracterised as a raiding force or an ideological entity driven solely by global jihadist ideology, while in practice the group has built a light administrative order capable of dispensing justice, levying taxes, regulating social life and presenting itself, however coercively, as an alternative to absent or distrusted state authority.
JNIM spent the following years expanding aggressively into Burkina Faso and Niger, committing several high-profile mass casualty attacks and sabotaging infrastructure. The group targeted the Ouagadougou French Embassy in 2018 and the Kati military base in 2022, also destroying telecommunications infrastructure, critical transit bridges and electrical grids. In 2023, JNIM blockaded Timbuktu using siege warfare and closed off food, fuel, and commercial supplies. JNIM learnt from these experiences and, in 2025, began exerting pressure on the Malian state directly by imposing a fuel blockade on Bamako. By attacking tankers carrying fuel, kidnapping drivers, and reportedly burning more than 100 trucks bound for Bamako, JNIM targeted the country’s dependence on overland supply routes from neighbours such as Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire.
The effects of the blockade were felt across Mali, with long queues forming outside petrol stations, motorists abandoning vehicles, transport fares rising sharply, food prices increasing as supply chains faltered, and diesel shortages disrupting generators used by hospitals and businesses. Schools and universities were temporarily closed, while army convoys had to escort fuel shipments from the borders to the capital despite the continuing risk of ambush. JNIM exposed how vulnerable the junta remained outside the capital and undermined the core claim on which its legitimacy rested: that military authority would restore order where civilian governments had failed.
On 25 April this year, the world woke up to headlines that a series of coordinated attacks had struck multiple locations in Mali, including Bamako, Kati, Gao, Mopti, Sévaré and Kidal. Insurgents launched assaults on military bases and government facilities and exchanged gunfire at several locations. Within hours, JNIM claimed responsibility alongside Tuareg separatist forces from the Front de libération de l’Azawad.
While insurgent groups had long operated in Mali’s peripheral areas, the scale and synchronisation of the offensive were unprecedented. In the days that followed, Defence Minister Sadio Camara was killed after his residence in Kati, the garrison town near Bamako and symbolic centre of military power. Kidal, whose recapture in 2023 had been presented as a major victory for Mali and its Russian allies, again became central to the contest over state authority.
As instability stretched into late April and early May, many experts and observers cautioned that the junta’s collapse might be imminent. However, despite the scale of the attacks and repeated clashes, the regime proved far more durable than many critics expected. Mali’s political order had already become one in which formal democratic legitimacy was weak and control over mineral wealth mattered at least as much as constitutional procedure.
The resilience of Mali’s regime has also been reinforced by changes in the regional political environment. The withdrawal of Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger from ECOWAS and the formation of the Alliance of Sahel States marked a significant structural shift in regional politics. A single coup regime can be isolated, but a bloc of coup regimes can build an alternative diplomatic identity. As of June this year, Mali’s military regime remains firmly in power under General Goïta, and despite security challenges, industrial gold exports continue to flow, providing a critical economic lifeline to the junta and the security patrons it needs to survive.
Mali’s future will not be decided by whether it can recreate the appearance of democracy that existed before the 2012 coups, but by whether any political order can restore credible authority across a territory where rival actors already govern, tax and coerce. Gold did not create Mali’s democratic weakness, nor did it by itself produce jihadist networks. However, gold monetised the country’s fragmented sovereignty and financed the coercive intermediaries who could out-govern, out-tax and outlast a state that was already shallow in its institutional reach. Mali’s crisis asks a sharper question than whether democracy is receding in Africa. It asks what kind of legitimacy survives when democratic form is never matched by state performance.
Erika van der Merwe
Erika is a research intern with the Peace and Security Programme at Good Governance Africa. She is pursuing a Master’s in International Relations from the University of Cape Town, where she specialises in security studies. Her academic interests include counterinsurgency, military science, and African peace and security. Erika has contributed to the Yale Review of International Studies and has experience in intelligence writing in a consulting capacity. She has also held several executive student leadership positions at the university, where she focused on youth development and private sector engagement.
