Ungoverned Spaces and Border Porosity in the Sahel–Nigeria Corridor

This article interrogates the structural determinants of territorial ungovernability along the Sahel–Nigeria corridor and their consequences for transnational terrorism and criminal economies. The dominant ungoverned space paradigm treats such territories as voids awaiting state presence, and the competitive governance literature has corrected that view by demonstrating dense contestation among authority providers. This article argues that both accounts are now incomplete, because the institutional rupture between the Economic Community of West African States and the Alliance of Sahel States has introduced a second tier of governance competition, between rival regional architectures, that operates as an independent producer of ungovernability. Employing a qualitative political economy design and process tracing across the period from 2023 to July 2026, the study specifies three observable implications and evaluates them against the record. The findings indicate that the rupture has become structural rather than diplomatic, since a common external tariff, a confederal investment bank, and associated apparatus create material interests in separation that the parallel negotiation on trade and mobility has not dissolved. Security cooperation of the kind the joint task force once supplied has not been restored within that partial thaw. Escalation has concentrated in the frontier zone specifically, with a new armed formation active along the Nigeria–Niger border from late 2024 and jihadist operations intensifying in border localities through 2026, a spatial pattern that generalised state weakness does not predict. On criminal political economy the article advances a deliberately calibrated claim, holding that independent sources are consistent with elite participation in illicit extraction while rent-mediated violence delegation renders individual attribution unavailable on open-source evidence.