The review Humanitarian Alternatives is issuing a call for papers for its next issue, which will be published in November 2026 and will focus on the following theme: “Humanitarian issues and political reconfigurations in the Sahel region” (provisional title). If you work in the aid sector or carry out research in humanitarianism and would like to submit a planned article on this particular theme, please send a summary of your subject and a draft plan (two pages maximum, including a short history about yourself) by 18 May 2026 to the following e-mail addresses: contact@alternatives-humanitaires.org; camille.haye@sciencespo.fr. You will receive a reply by 5 June 2026 at the latest. The finished articles, written in French or English, should be submitted by 21 September 2026 and should be around 2,200 words long if in English or around 2,400 words long if in French, including footnotes. Seven or eight articles will be published for the Focus section of this issue of Humanitarian Alternatives.
For each issue, we also consider articles relating to humanitarian work that explore subjects other than that which this issue focuses on. They could be published in the sections “Perspectives”, “Transitions”, “Innovations”, “Ethics”, “Reportage” or “Opinion”. So we are inviting you to put forward draft articles for these sections too.
Humanitarian issues and political reconfigurations in the Sahel region
The focus of this edition is coordinated by Camille Haye, a post-doctoral researcher in political science at Paris Panthéon-Sorbonne University and at the Africa research institute Institut des mondes africains, alongside Boris Martin, the review’s Editor-in-Chief.
Africa’s Sahel region is an area of the world where a tangle of crises are being played out. In geo-climatic terms, the Sahel belt is a zone that crosses Africa from west to east – from Mauritania to the Horn of Africa. Many of the states that this region encompasses stand out for their fragile structural capacities and their high level of poverty, factors that put them at the bottom of the Human Development Index’s global ranking. These countries are said to be under a support scheme of aid or dependent on international aid to maintain a budget balance and a relatively satisfactory level of public service. Yet geopolitical upheavals and climate-related disruptions have added to their structural difficulties. The Sahel region is characterised by seasonal change: rainy seasons alternate with dry spells. Global warming has worsened this trend with humanitarian shocks from floods and lean periods. For example, a 1970s drought contributed to making the Sahel region a priority global aid zone with a large-scale arrival of international non-governmental organisations (NGOs) seeking to tackle a famine there. Later, in the 1990s, humanitarian players or development NGOs took on broader social missions against a backdrop of economically liberal agendas: international NGOs became proxies, even substitutes, for public services that were suffering from programmes of structural adjustment. The Sahel region has also been a priority zone for experiments in the humanitarian-development-peace triple nexus. For example, in the face of paradoxically “chronic” emergencies, the debate between emergency aid and development aid was particularly fierce in Niger’s 2005 food crisis.
On the one hand, a profusion of missions and complementarity between NGOs has long fostered recognition of a need to combine emergency aid with long-term programmes. But on the other hand, the shocks that the region has undergone and whose consequences promise to be long-lasting force these same questions to be asked again in fresh terms. The Sudanese civil war, clashes between Ethiopia and Eritrea, the rise of militias, and conflicts in the Lake Chad and Central Sahel regions involving jihadist groups claiming allegiance to Islamic State or Al-Qaeda are all trends that can be traced back over several decades. And ordinary civilians are the ones who suffer the most from them. So, the Sahel region is now firmly established as a paradigm of complex humanitarian crises – emergency humanitarian situations tied to a conflict and that entail substantial social breakdown. These conflicts bring about their share of harm to humans. For example, populations are displaced, infrastructure is degraded, access to social and sanitary services is restricted, food crises are created, human rights are violated, and levels of vulnerability are widely heightened. Not only do these protracted conflicts cause levels of urgency to peak, but they also cause us to think about aid in the long term. Camps of forcibly displaced people illustrate this.
Now, some Sahelian countries that have long been focal points of humanitarian operations are rejecting international NGOs, in line with regional and global political trends. Yet at the same time, other Sahelian countries are denouncing what they consider to be insufficient commitment from these NGOs. While the security situation in some regions has impeded access for aid for several years already, regimes expressing anti-Western rhetoric have gained power in the Central Sahel region (Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso), creating new restrictions for NGOs. Cuts to aid from Western funders, including France (by way of sanctions against governments born of coups d’état) have affected aid sent via NGOs. Even though provision of emergency aid was supposed to carry on, states sanctioned with aid cuts have, in turn, applied measures to restrict NGOs. For example, in November 2022, Mali banned French-funded NGOs from operating in its territory. NGOs affected by such diplomatic conflicts have had to decide between giving up on certain projects and looking for alternative sources of funding.
The shock closure of the United States Agency for International Development in 2025 – and the subsequent cuts to funding that represented around 40% of global aid – already seriously aggravated the crisis that this African region had been undergoing. Now the question is as follows: how can we meet needs as big as those in the Sahel region with swingeing budget cuts? In this sense, contributions to this new focus in Humanitarian Alternatives could continue the reflections that began in issue 30: Aid in danger: After the shock of 2025, the consequences and the response. Reflections on this global political context could be combined with the Sahel region’s domestic political issues, especially their governments’ mistrust of the humanitarian community. In Niger, in November 2024, the French NGO Acted had its licence to operate in the country revoked, as did its Nigerien partner, the NGO Action Pour le Bien Être. And in June 2025, the Niger office of the International Committee of the Red Cross closed after thirty-five years in the country – at the request of Niger’s authorities and against a backdrop of accusations of collusion with armed groups. This rhetoric is not new in this region affected by the actions of jihadist groups. In 2019 in Nigeria, the NGOs Mercy Corps and Action Against Hunger had to close their offices in the Nigerian state of Borno as the army accused them of complicity with the jihadist militant group Boko Haram – even though staff members of Action Against Hunger were being held prisoner by this same armed group. In this new edition of Humanitarian Alternatives, ideas could be suggested about how aid players could now negotiate the continuation or set-up of their programmes and, more broadly, their legitimacy in climates of mistrust, fuelled by the war on terror or by political polarisation that associates Western NGOs with governments of the Global North.
The geographical scope for this focus is the Sahel region in its broadest sense. It is not limited to the Western or French-speaking Sahel region, nor to states included in an international alliance delimiting a Sahelian political bloc among others (for example, the G5 Sahel or the Alliance of Sahel States). Indeed, we welcome articles about English-speaking countries in the Sahel region too. We hope to receive original contributions, written by professionals in the humanitarian sector or by experts and university professors, and that tackle issues such as:
- Difficulties in gaining access to Sahel crisis zones due to political or security reasons. Contributions could tackle the issues of negotiation with political authorities, non-state armed groups (militias, rebel factions, etc.) and limits imposed by anti-terror norms on access for aid.
- Issues regarding the humanitarian-development-peace triple nexus in the Sahel region and resilience in chronic or protracted crises there, whether food crises, sanitary crises, climate crises, or refugee and displacement crises.
- Effects of financial cuts to aid from traditional funders (American, French, European, etc.) for the Sahel region and the rise in importance of emerging funders (China, Qatar, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, etc.).
- Consequences of authoritarian regimes with nationalist rhetoric having gained power in the Sahel region and of the rise of anti-Western sentiment there.
