Extraction as Inheritance: Longue Durée, Militarized Mineral Access, and State Choice in the Sahel

Laura Kilbury, University of Massachusetts-Boston (United States)

This paper traces how longue durée patterns of extraction shape contemporary contests over gold, lithium, and uranium in the Sahel. Colonial and post-colonial concession regimes established brokerage networks that persistently structure access to mineral wealth and mediate relations among authoritarian military governments in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, jihadist groups financing operations via illicit artisanal mining, and transnational security actors from China, Russia, and Western intermediaries. These historical legacies allow juntas to leverage critical minerals for military and security support, consolidate authority, and pursue resource-nationalist reforms, while environmental degradation, weak oversight, and predatory governance fuel local grievances that insurgents exploit. Using a political ecology lens, the study combines archival reconstruction, temporal actor–project network analysis, elite discourse, conflict-event data, and satellite-derived land-cover metrics to trace these interactions. Findings show that security-for-resource arrangements exacerbate instability. Situating contemporary policy within long-term extraction histories underscores transparency, legal reform, and local inclusion as critical levers for environmental peace-building in the Sahel.