El Sahelepicentro yihadista en África Occidental

Abstract

The Sahel, the southern shore of the Sahara, has been the inter- connection node in West Africa for centuries, between the Gulf of Guinea and the Maghreb, and from there with Europe. For this reason, and although it apparently constitutes a remote space, if already in the past it was linked to Europe, much more in the reality of a global world, in such a way that it is even affirmed that the Sahel is the southern border of Europe. The difficult structural conditions of the region -shortage of fertile land, water, pasture, etc.- together with an identity based on ethnicity and in a framework of low-income states, generate an environment that remains, in the best most cases, in an unstable balance, balance com- pletely altered by climate change and exponential population growth. Terrorist and organized crime groups flourish and settle in this destabilized region, contributing to chaos and disorder according to the maxim, the worse the better. And that chaos and that disorder expands, from the Sahelian epicenter, throughout the region and reaches a global dimension. If, in addition, in the midst of the reconfiguration of the global order, new actors -state and non-state- instrumentalize the diffe- rences and disputes of the Sahelian societies to obtain positions of advantage in the new global arena, the possibility that this epicenter stabilizes is increasingly more remote