Re-Configuring the Sahel: The Imaginary Turn of Geopolitics in a Kaleidoscopic Region

This special issue advances a critical rethinking of geopolitics through the lens of geopolitical imaginaries, with a particular focus on the Sahel. The alleged resurgence of ‘geopolitics’ as both an academic and policy keyword has been accompanied by conceptual ambiguities and political baggage, which often recycle outdated assumptions about great power competition, thereby sidelining subaltern agency and reproducing colonial tropes. In contrast, the imaginary turn highlights how representational meaning-making practices shape international politics by envisioning and enacting spatial orders. The Sahel offers a particularly fruitful case to test this approach. Historically imagined as both buffer and frontier, the region epitomises the entanglement of climatic, colonial, and strategic discourses. Today, it is a stage for global rivalries depicted as positing the ‘West’ against the ‘East’, and the ‘North’ against the ‘South’, but also a site for the local mobilisation anti-colonial and Pan-Africanist imaginaries to contest external dominance and reassert agency. The contributions collected here examine imaginaries of the Sahel (as constructed by outsiders), in the Sahel (embedded in domestic contestations), and by the Sahel (articulated by local actors projecting alternative orders). Drawing on ethnographic research, discourse analysis, and historical perspectives, they illuminate how geopolitical imaginaries intersect, clash, and transform, shaping both conflict dynamics and regional governance. By situating geopolitical imaginaries at the centre of analysis, this special issue contributes to pushing further the agenda of critical geopolitics into a new terrain, opening up the field for methodological reflections and empirical insights.