JIDELFA

West Africa is experiencing a structural collapse of its post-Cold War security order. JIDELFA's conflict prevention work examines the early-warning indicators that precede armed conflict: political exclusion, governance failure, intercommunal tension, and humanitarian underfunding, and evaluates the mediation frameworks and diplomatic instruments available to regional actors before violence becomes entrenched. Drawing on ACLED incident data and field reporting, this programme interrogates why prevention windows close and what institutional design would keep them open. The Sahel's trajectory from 2020 to 2026 is the central case study: a region where early warning existed but political will did not.

The January 2025 withdrawal of Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger from ECOWAS is the most consequential rupture in West African regional governance since 1975. JIDELFA's multilateral diplomacy programme analyses the conditions under which regional institutions lose and regain legitimacy, the structural incentives that drive states toward or away from multilateral frameworks, and the mechanisms through which diplomatic re-engagement becomes possible. The AES-ECOWAS fracture is not merely a diplomatic problem; it is an operational one, removing the governance architecture that counterterrorism, humanitarian response, and economic integration depend on.

The jihadist expansion across the Sahel and into coastal West Africa is not primarily a military failure. It is the compound consequence of security sectors that historically extracted from rather than protected civilian populations. JIDELFA's security sector reform work asks what accountable, civilian-led security governance looks like in states where the security apparatus has itself become a source of insecurity. This includes analysis of the VDP self-defence militia model in Burkina Faso, the structural implications of Africa Corps embedding, and what donor-supported reform programmes have and have not achieved in the Lake Chad Basin.

24.4 million people across the Sahel require humanitarian assistance in 2026. Over 14,800 schools have closed, leaving three million children without education. The 2025 humanitarian appeal for the region was less than a quarter funded. JIDELFA's human security programme treats humanitarian underfunding as a security failure, not merely a development one. It tracks the intersection of displacement, food insecurity, educational collapse, and radicalisation pathways, and advocates for humanitarian financing treated as a long-term security investment rather than an annual budgetary decision subject to donor fatigue.

JIDELFA's research programme produces analysis that is rigorously sourced, practically oriented, and written for decision-makers rather than academic audiences. Each Security Brief, Conflict Intelligence update, and Threat Actor profile is grounded in verifiable, publicly attributed data and subjected to citation integrity review before publication. Primary outputs include policy briefs, the monthly situation report, and the Conflict Intelligence Module, which provides interactive map-based access to country-level risk assessments across West Africa. Independence from all governments, donors, and political organisations is a non-negotiable condition of JIDELFA's research mandate.