West Africa has experienced a series of significant geopolitical developments in recent years, with the potential to reshape both its political landscape and economic trajectory. These are, in many ways, years in which decades have passed. Longstanding regimes have collapsed, populations have expanded rapidly, and economic growth has, in aggregate terms, generally trended upwards across the region. Yet these positive developments have been accompanied by equally serious challenges. A persistent jihadist insurgency continues to destabilise the Sahel, military coups have undermined the post-90s move towards democratisation, and regional institutions such as ECOWAS have seen their legitimacy increasingly questioned, particularly in light of the emergence of the

Alliance of Sahel States

as a contender to the Pan-African aspiration of politically uniting the region.

An increased repression of LGBT+ communities

Among these developments, one particularly alarming trend, and the focus of this submission, concerns the resurgence of legislative and political repression targeting gender and sexual minorities. Recent developments in Burkina Faso and Mali illustrate the severity of this trend. In Burkina Faso, the military government under

Captain Ibrahim Traoré

introduced legislation imposing a maximum 5-year prison sentence for homosexuality. This was later unanimously passed by his transitional assembly, materially jeopardising the social acceptance and relative safety of a country where LGBT Burkinabés had previously lived without fear of imprisonment (The Guardian, 2025). This change followed a similar law announced by the military government of neighbouring Mali, which also banned same-sex relationships and introduced mandatory 2-7 year prison sentences for an entire community of people, supposedly in the name of defending ‘traditional and moral values’ (Kojoué, 2024).

These developments, while alarming, are not entirely surprising when situated within the broader political context. Both regimes have simultaneously overseen restrictions on political and civil liberties such as the right of public assembly, alongside crackdowns on journalists and dissidents (Hughes, 2025). However, these actions must not be divorced from the context of the ongoing deadly Sahel insurgency as well as the structural economic constraints associated with longstanding patterns of dependency – i.e. Françafrique. As I have outlined elsewhere, if extremism is to be understood as a germ, poverty is the condition that allows said germ to spread rapidly (Doucouré 2024), with said poverty being directly attributable to the persistence of uneven trade dependencies and extractive commerce rooted in colonialism. It is no coincidence that in two of the poorest and most economically exploited nations of our planet, we may observe serious political instability, the rise of military rule, and extremism. With that said, it would be analytically insufficient to attribute the rise in

the persecution of gender and sexual minorities

solely to military governance or neocolonial pressures. Indeed, the Republic of Senegal offers an intriguing and instructive mini-case study through which we may complicate the easy answers to questions to be asked of this trend. This is a country that, per Regional/Central bank data, attained for its citizens over 85% of the GDP per capita of both Burkina Faso and Mali, combined. Although, like many emerging economies, the material reality of this relatively strong economic performance is deeply uneven, with poverty very much remaining a significant issue in Senegal.

Concerning the rise in homophobic repression across West Africa, Senegal is a useful case study to consider here not primarily because of its economic position relative to Burkina Faso and Mali but, rather, because the country has generally been praised by geopolitical observers for having preserved a ‘democratic tradition’ (Center for Strategic and International Studies,2024); the transfer of power from civilian to civilian has persisted in spite of domestic and numerous regional constitutional crises (Yabi and Holman, 2024). The country has never experienced a single coup d’etat, a matter of significance given that the fact that Africa as a whole has experienced, until 2010, at least 169 coup attempts – with 51.5% ultimately being successful seizures of power (Powell and Thyne 2011, p. 255).

These democratic and constitutional credentials are to be …