Take It to the People: A Civil-Military Roadmap for the G5 Sahel

In December 2018, leaders of the G5 Sahel Joint Force Member States — Mali, Mauritania, Chad, Burkina Faso, and Niger — and international donors gathered for a coordination conference in Nouakchott, Mauritania to orchestrate funding for the Joint Force's Priority Investment Program (PIP) aimed at addressing the Sahel region's chronic violence and fragility. The G5's PIP reflects the strategic intention to operationalize the Joint Force as an instrument both of security and development — a strategy that would adequately address the complex socio-economic, political, and climate change challenges driving instability across the region.

In order to accomplish the objectives outlined in its Development and Security Strategy (SDS), the G5 Sahel needs to emerge from the shadow of its current operational reality. Since its formation in 2014, the G5 has focused on conducting joint cross-border military operations to address the proliferation of terrorism, human trafficking, and transnational organized crime. Not only have these operations suffered from chronic underfunding, but their preoccupation with military-only solutions has stunted the potential efficacy of the Joint Force itself.

The December 2018 coordination conference — and its more than $2.6 billion in pledged funds from donors like the United States, the European Union, Saudi Arabia, and China — will help remedy the G5's cash flow problems. In a global context of restricted domestic budgets and a reduced appetite for prolonged stabilization projects, the G5 has emerged as a key security partner for countries keen on reducing violent extremism and transnational organized crime in the Sahel region. Global leaders, from U.S. National Security Advisor John Bolton to French President Emmanuel Macron, have affirmed their support for the G5 Sahel as a regionally-led security structure that limits their own troop commitments in West African countries.

Yet in order for the G5 Sahel to fully realize its potential as a guarantor of human security across the region, it needs to enable the Sahel's civilian and military communities of the Sahel to work together to address common security threats.

First, the G5 should develop and coordinate a Regional Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration Program. Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration — or DDR — is the process that disarms, demilitarizes, and reintegrates former combatants into civilian life, the armed forces, or civilian security structures like the police and the gendarmes. While initially conceived as an implementation component of a peace agreement, DDR has evolved into its "third generation" — a non-kinetic stabilization tool used in conflict zones to demobilize combatants without an enemy-centric paradigm. In the fight against the Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda and Boko Haram in the Lake Chad Region, the socioeconomic benefits of reintegration programs have been used to incentivize defections from religious extremist groups.

Given the fragmented nature of the violent non-state actors spread across the region's porous borders, the G5 Sahel would do well to coordinate a regional DDR approach for processing individual combatants and former armed groups. A "third generation" DDR process would help create breathing room for regional and political reconciliation in the Sahel while incentivizing the defection of combatants from armed groups. Some Sahel countries, like Mali and Niger, have already initiated DDR programs while others, like Mauritania and Burkina Faso, have not. The G5 can play a natural coordination role in guiding the creation of domestic conditional amnesty legislation that maintains strict adherence to the international law of armed conflict while facilitating the intelligence sharing and cross-border verification processes necessary to a successful regional DDR program. A successful regional third-generation DDR process can simultaneously demobilize the armed insurgencies that threaten the lives of people across the Sahel and ensure the sustainability of long-term ex-combatant reintegration into local communities and national political economies.

The G5 should also integrate regional youth leaders into the G5 Permanent Secretariat. Sahelian youth face limited social mobility, local and national political exclusion, and few opportunities for self-sufficiency in the region's fragile economies. As violent conflict rapidly proliferates and the Sahel's structural challenges remain unameliorated, young people across the region struggle to establish themselves in their communities, leading to the frustration that negatively affects youth resilience to violent organizations, violent extremism (VE), and human trafficking. Engaging with youth across the Sahel and integrating them into governance structures simultaneously leverages their innovative approaches to regional security challenges and facilitates the integration of their perspectives into policy formation and implementation.

In recognition of this crucial challenge to regional security, the G5 Sahel has taken important steps to support youth-led peacebuilding and economic empowerment initiatives in all five Member States. Yet regional youth leaders — given population bulges and the crucial role that youth play in the Sahel — the G5 could formally incorporate a youth convening mechanism into its Permanent Secretariat structure. It should continue to build on current youth civic engagement initiatives and establish a non-voting advisory body that acts as a convening mechanism for constructive, mutually beneficial engagement around military and non-military youth operations. Like the West Africa Civil Society Forum that supports the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the G5 should consider taking its pre-existing youth engagement initiatives and transforming them into a permanent mechanism that can provide ongoing thematic advice on youth engagement to the Experts on Defense and Security, Governance, Infrastructure, and Resilience.

Finally, the G5 Sahel would do well to integrate a Community-Based Policing Approach into the G5 Sahel's police component. Since December 2017, the G5 Permanent Secretariat has created and operationalized the police component of the Joint Force to improve the effectiveness of each Member State's criminal justice system. So far, the Member States have enabled the police component to legally and functionally operate within each respective territory. The G5 has also announced the creation of an investigative brigade and has developed the conceptual framework for the organization and functioning of this component.

In order to maximize the efficacy of its police component in combatting both transnational and communal security threats, the Joint Force should incorporate a community-based policing approach into its operational framework. A community-based policing approach entails regular consultation between police forces and the communities that they protect in order to build a shared understanding of local violence. In the context of the Sahel, community-based policing would allow those vulnerable to either recruitment into violent activity or victimization by communal and transnational violence to build trust with police officers that facilitate intelligence sharing and the management of community threats. It would also ensure an inclusive approach to incorporating the perspectives of women, youth, ethnic minorities, and people living with disabilities into the security operations that impact their lives.

Poor relations between Sahelian populations and their local, national, and regional governance structures are a key driver of fragility and violent conflict across the region. The G5 Sahel has an opportunity to model inclusive and interactive civil-military relations both for individual armed forces and for civilian governments. Drawing communities into the formation and implementation of the policies and programs that impact their security and their livelihood can build the trust and collaboration necessary to improve human security in the Sahel.

Daniella Montemarano is the Program Officer for the Sahel at the International Republican Institute, where she manages projects that support the implementation of Mali's 2015 Peace Agreement and strengthen civic engagement between youth and the G5 Sahel Joint Force. She specializes in stabilization operations, conflict resolution, and transitional justice.