Medieval-style fortifications are back in the Sahel

aandsoitis 4 days ago 18 commentsRead Article on economist.com

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defrost•4 days ago

For anyone with an interest this article is cut down and pared slice of a portion of the work of Dr. Olivier Walther and Dr. Steven Radil, geographers at the University of Florida.

A somewhat longer article of theirs is Why African Borderlands Keep Burning (April 15, 2026) - https://africanarguments.org/2026/04/why-african-borderlands...

and a recent paper Mapping the long-term trajectories of political violence in Africa (MARCH 2026) - https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.06502

subscribed•11 minutes ago

Thank you very much.

xphos•about 1 hour ago

Thank you for the extra links i was think this article seemed to be missing context or a conclusion

lyu07282•20 minutes ago

Thank's it adds a lot to explain why something like this pops up in the Economist of all places

> The United States and its allies should align its efforts accordingly. That means accepting longer time horizons, investing in less visible cross-border mechanisms over high-profile bilateral wins, and recognising that the periphery is now the centre.

oh boy

> African governments understand this dynamic, which is why regional organisations like the African Union, the Economic Community of West African States, and even the juntas of the Alliance of Sahel States increasingly emphasise multinational responses.

Not to be too much of a panafrican commie here, but AES left the Ecowas months ago I hope(?) the authors were aware of this? Seems like worth mentioning, perhaps it means something who knows. I guess we learn more about what to think about the Shael states when the US or France invades them again in a few months from now.

0xcafefood•about 1 hour ago

I thought walled towns died not due to state authority becoming stronger, but because offensive weaponry simply became effective enough to overcome walls. Walls can protect you from men with swords, but not from heavy artillery or bombers. Today, wouldn't a fleet of cheap drones render a wall moot?

reillyse•about 1 hour ago

But they also protect you from more low level lawlessness and if the law situation inside and outside the wall are the same (because of stronger states) they stop being worth maintaining.

Think in the US, the cops wouldn’t survive against a couple of machine guns and a drone strike, but they are still useful for security purposes.

jubilanti•about 1 hour ago

The article is more talking about landscape fortifications like trenches, ramparts, moats, and berms that slow down trucks.

CuriouslyC•about 1 hour ago

I suspect people are motivated by the desire not not catch stray bullets more than dissuade a concerted attack.

ErroneousBosh•14 minutes ago

> I thought walled towns died not due to state authority becoming stronger, but because offensive weaponry simply became effective enough to overcome walls.

Yes, but people will also say that "Security through obscurity is not security" and then in the same breath sneer derisively at how leaving ssh on port 22 is just amateur hour stuff.

cineticdaffodil•about 1 hour ago

Walls can not protect you from dhijadists either, the mortars take out the city- and besieging starves it out. In sudan- a "walled and ditched" city recently fell to the djandjhawid.. https://www.iss.europa.eu/publications/commentary/fall-el-fa...

yorwba•about 1 hour ago

Of course no fortification can withstand overwhelming force indefinitely, but el-Fasher held out 1.5 years while completely surrounded, which isn't too shabby. (Here's a map from a year prior: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/archive/5/52/... It's the small pink blob of army-controlled territory labeled "Al-Fashir" within the gray mass of the RSF.) And the RSF are a formerly government-affiliated civil war faction with a lot more firepower than jihadist militias like JNIM or ISSP.

If some trenches and an earth wall turn a short raid into a long siege, that at least gives the army some time to send reinforcements and attack the besiegers.

bluGill•about 1 hour ago

They give you time though. It's certainly not perfect, but no wall ever was. You could scale the old wall with a ladder if you wanted to, but it slowed you down and that gave the defenders time to do something about that.

ceejayoz•31 minutes ago

Alone, no. But the fact that modern militaries still build them around bases in insecure areas should give you a moment's pause before dismissing them entirely.

fsagx•4 days ago

https://archive.is/wuHji

ufocia•11 minutes ago

"Newly walled towns are a sign of shrivelling state authority" was my thought when I saw the walled off Capitol.

It is sad when the government needs walls to protect itself from its own people, a sign of weakness. To add to the irony the Capitol used to be, quite literally, the "people's house."

rjsw•about 1 hour ago

The UK built [1] castles in Afghanistan recently too.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hesco_bastion

pigpop•43 minutes ago

More of a Roman fort I'd say.

rjsw•12 minutes ago

Or an early Norman one, for the same reasons. The people in the fort were different to those outside, city walls were built later in the medieval period once those differences had reduced.