The Changing Face of Foreign Intervention in African Conflicts

The past decade has witnessed a fundamental change in how foreign powers engage with conflicts on the African continent. Since the end of the Cold War, foreign intervention in African conflicts had generally taken the form of multilateral peacekeeping forces, French and United States (US) counterterrorism operations, as well as European capacity building of African armies. The advent of multipolarity has manifested itself in a rapid decline of all three of these types of interventions and, since around 2015, in the growing role of non-Western powers, most notably the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Russia and Turkey.

This article first presents a visualization of these changing patterns of foreign intervention in major African intrastate conflicts since 2011.¹ It then argues that the retreat of Western powers and multilateral peace operations as well as the concomitant rise of interventions by non-Western powers have contributed to growing levels of violence on the continent. The availability of alternative security partners has also created more favourable conditions for military coups. In two cases, these new patterns have led to proxy wars between foreign powers – a phenomenon not seen in Africa since the end of the Cold War. Most evidence to date suggests that the newly intervening powers have had as little success as Western states in helping their African allies stabilize their hold on power against insurgencies.

Changing Patterns of Foreign Intervention

Prior to the mid-2010s, patterns of foreign engagement in African conflicts were largely consistent across the continent. Such engagement included several standard components in varying constellations. First, multilateral peace operations were deployed to back up peace agreements. Second, since the early 2000s, the US and then France cooperated with a number of African governments to fight jihadist groups in several subregions. Third, states that hosted peacekeeping missions and/or counterterrorism operations also became recipients of EU capacity-building efforts. By the early 2010s, this triad of foreign intervention reflected a shift from state-building efforts towards stabilization and the delegation to African militaries – including in the domain of peace operations and stabilization missions, which were increasingly conducted under the aegis of the African Union, sub-regional organisations or by ad-hoc coalitions such as the G5 Sahel states, while being funded through the United Nations (UN) system or by Western states.

By the mid-2010s, widespread disillusion about the limited success of Western and multilateral interventionism set in – both in Western policy circles and among African governments and the public. The budgets and headcount of UN peacekeeping operations in Africa peaked in 2014–15 and have since consistently declined (see Infographic 1).

Around the same time, new external actors began intervening in conflicts on the continent. The UAE and Turkey began providing security assistance in 2010 and 2011, respectively, to different actors in Somalia. In 2014, the UAE conducted air strikes and provided arms in support of armed groups in Libya allied with Khalifa Haftar. In 2019, the Libyan civil war became fully internationalised: the UAE and Russian Wagner Group supported Haftar’s Tripoli offensive, while Turkey backed the government in Tripoli. A year before, the Wagner Group had already begun providing assistance to the Bashir regime in Sudan and the government of Faustin-Archange Touadéra in the Central African Republic (CAR). Similar interventions have followed since. The UAE, Turkey and Iran have deployed drones in Ethiopia’s Tigray war and on opposing sides in Sudan’s civil war since 2023. Russia – first through the Wagner Group, then through its army – has gone on to provide military assistance to both sides in Sudan’s civil war and to the military junta in Mali, as well as to a lesser extent to those in Niger and Burkina Faso.

The growing interventionism by these non-Western powers contributed substantially to the withdrawal of Western states and multilateral organisations from conflicts on the continent. In the Sahel states, Russian-backed military leaders compelled the departure of French and US forces, the UN Mission in Mali, as well as most European capacity-building missions. In Libya and Sudan, neither Western states nor multilateral institutions could play any meaningful role in containing conflicts, owing to divisions in the UN Security Council – not least due to the Russian role in both conflicts – as well as Western powers’ reluctance to exert pressure on their Emirati allies. For the same reason, the newly intervening powers also routinely ignored UN arms embargoes.

When combined, these patterns become visible in Infographic 2 as a gradual decrease in UN and UN-backed peacekeeping operations as well as combat missions and airstrikes by Western states, in combination with a proliferation since 2019 of combat missions and airstrikes by the UAE, Turkey and Russia.² Infographic 3 shows similar patterns regarding foreign support to African belligerents in the form of training or finance.

Infographic 4 indicates that the Western withdrawal from African conflicts was also reflected by a decline in arms shipments. While the total volume of arms deliveries decreased over time, since 2019 no Western state has been among the three largest suppliers to the selected African conflicts. Instead, large quantities of arms have been delivered that cannot be directly attributed to any supplier. This data gap can most likely be attributed to the risk of reputational damage or the fact that arms deliveries violate UN arms embargoes and are therefore kept secret.

How African Military Actors Make Use of Multipolarity

The advent of a new set of foreign powers willing to supply arms and intervene to support their allies clearly altered the calculations of African governments, military officers and rebel leaders.

First, the availability of foreign support from the newly intervening powers has doubtlessly contributed to the eruption of major conflicts by leading belligerents to calculate that they could gain the upper hand. To resort to counterfactuals: during the 2000s, Libya’s Khalifa Haftar, Ethiopia’s Abiy Ahmed and Sudan’s Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo would have had far greater difficulty in obtaining foreign backing for their war efforts, and pressure from Western states and UN sanctions would have weighed more heavily on their decision-making. The backing all three enjoyed from the UAE strengthened their position vis-à-vis their domestic political rivals. Emirati support therefore could only have encouraged them to go to war against Tripoli, Tigray and the Sudanese Armed Forces and to continue these wars even when a rapid military victory failed to materialize. Foreign support from these actors therefore has also made conflicts harder to resolve, as is most evident in the case of Sudan.

Second, for African governments facing rebel groups, Russian support in particular has opened up opportunities for more ruthless counterinsurgency. In CAR, Russian backing allowed Touadéra to confront rebel groups militarily rather than negotiate, while in Mali it enabled military leaders to dismiss the longstanding insistence on the Algiers Peace Agreement by Algeria and France and to wage war against northern Malian rebels. In both countries, the shift from Western support to Russian assistance also prompted a radicalisation of counterinsurgency warfare, with frequent reports of atrocities by the Malian and CAR armies or their Russian allies. In both cases, governments apparently felt empowered to wage war without any regard for international humanitarian law since they no longer had to consider potential concerns of Western partners.

Third, receding Western influence and the availability of alternative security partners has improved the chances of success for prospective putschists. To be sure, Western states helped create favourable conditions for coups, including through their heavily security-focused approach to the crises in the Sahel states which helped empower the military. Moreover, the international norm ostracizing military coups had already come under increasing pressure before the advent of the newly intervening powers. Both Western governments and the African Union had already undermined their own commitment to that norm with their lenient reactions to the first of two successive military takeovers in Mali (August 2020) as well as those in Chad (April 2021) and Sudan (October 2021).

Subsequently, however, a pattern emerged whereby African coup leaders reacted to Western condemnation of their takeovers by ejecting French and US forces while welcoming assistance from non-Western states. To military officers in neighbouring countries, this signalled new opportunities to eschew Western pressure following a takeover. By the time of the coup d’état in Niger (July 2023), several Western governments displayed an increasing willingness to accept the fait accompli, provided they could maintain their military presence in the country. For military officers considering taking over power in other states on the continent, the growing competition among foreign security partners is good news. Yet, this same competition also provides incumbent coup leaders and autocrats with greater choice when seeking foreign assistance in coup-proofing their regimes – as evidenced by their demand for close protection and other services from Russia’s Africa Corps.

Overall, emerging patterns of intervention increasingly resemble a continent-wide market for foreign security assistance. Regimes that are considered unpalatable by Western states now find ready partners in newly intervening powers. There are no longer clear geopolitical or ideological fault lines governing these relationships: by partnering with Russia, African leaders do not necessarily deter Western courtship, but may in fact spur offers for assistance by Western states anxious not to yield the floor to Russia. Libya’s Haftar, who is in control of prime geopolitical real estate, best exemplifies this trend towards multi-alignment: He not only hosts a Russian military presence and cooperates closely with the UAE on support for Dagalo in Sudan, but also maintains military cooperation with Egypt, Turkey, Greece, Italy and the US, among others.

Implications for Conflict Dynamics and Conflict Management

The arrival of new intervening powers in Africa, coming on the back of intensifying jihadist insurgencies and expanding US and French counterterrorism operations during the 2010s, has further increased the prevalence of internationalized civil wars on the continent. The growing internationalization of civil wars has been a global trend that has been particularly pronounced across the Middle East and Africa since the early 2010s and has gone hand in hand with their increasing lethality. This is borne out by the examples of Ethiopia and Sudan – two civil wars that have caused the greatest number of casualties and displaced persons in the 2020s. Internationalized civil wars also tend to last longer. Multipolarity, in the form of a growing range of foreign interventions in African wars therefore manifests itself first and foremost in the growing scope and scale of violent conflict on the continent.

Multilateralism no longer offers actionable responses to these patterns of internationalized civil wars. Instead, foreign interveners themselves become key actors in the settlement of such conflicts. This could take the form of military victories by one side, including following lengthy and vicious counterinsurgencies. Yet, to date there are no clear-cut cases of such victories. In fact, there are several cases in which such strategies have backfired – including in Ethiopia, Mali and Burkina Faso. Alternatively, foreign powers could choose to freeze a conflict – as Russia and Turkey have done in Libya – thereby rendering their African clients dependent on continued external support. Western governments seeking to support the settlement of African conflicts would also have to engage with intervening powers directly. To date, however, there are no signs that European states or the US are willing to exert meaningful pressure on actors such as the UAE for their role in African conflicts.

The authors would like to acknowledge the tremendous effort made by Andrea Sperk, Mark Schrolle, Yussuf El-Banna, and Ida Büsch in supporting the research. Further we would like to express our gratitude to Daniel Kettner, Arthur Buliz and Christoph Baron for their continued support, and to Niko Wilkesmann for designing the visuals. 

¹ The cases selected include all African intrastate conflicts from 2011 to 2024 in which the number of fatalities, as recorded by Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP), crossed the threshold of 1,000 in at least one year within this time period, thereby meeting the definition of war according to the UCDP. The data presented in this analysis are the UCDP high estimates. As obtaining exact data on conflict-related events can be extremely difficult, the numbers of battle-related deaths should be interpreted as baseline figures. The Central African Republic was included because UCDP fatalities figures for 2013 (high estimate 488) significantly underestimate documented conflict-related deaths. Around 1,000 people were killed in the capital Bangui on December 5–6^th, 2013 alone, in addition to numerous other events during that year in which dozens to hundreds of people were killed.

² Airstrikes have been attributed to a foreign state where sourcing suggests that this state has not only provided aircraft – whether combat drones or fighter jets – but also its operators. In cases in which there is no evidence for foreign operators or where sourcing suggests that local operators pilot foreign-supplied drones, the provision of aircraft has been categorized as arms deliveries. Combat missions carried out by foreign mercenaries are attributed to a foreign state in which there is substantial evidence that this state helped deploy mercenaries to an African conflict to support a local belligerent, such as in the case of Syrian fighters deployed by Turkey in Libya or Colombian mercenaries deployed by the UAE in Sudan. Where mercenaries have been hired by a local belligerent without foreign state support, this is categorized as activity by a private military company.

This spotlight was first published as the chapter “The Changing Face of Foreign Intervention in African Conflicts”, in: Christine Hackenesch, Tobias Heidland and Denis Tull (eds.), Leverage and Limits: What African Actors Make of the New Multipolarity, Megatrends Afrika Working Paper 21, October 2025.

Dr Wolfram Lacher is a Project Director of Megatrends Afrika and a Senior Associate in the research division Africa and Middle East at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP).

Ann-Marie Verhoeven is Research Assistant at Megatrends Afrika at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP).

Julia Fath is Project Coordinator of Megatrends Afrika at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP).