As the Security Council prepares for its July 2026 briefing on West Africa and the Sahel, the situation has already moved well past anything the Council itself decided or authorised. In the weeks before it, Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger reportedly carried out coordinated air strikes against suspected terrorist positions inside Mali, acting through the Alliance of Sahel States and invoking the collective defence architecture of the Liptako-Gourma Charter rather than any framework the UN Charter contemplates. Meanwhile, on 18 June, shooters linked to Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM) attacked Niamey’s international airport, killing soldiers and civilians before security forces killed twenty-two assailants. The Council’s own response to the deteriorating picture has been mostly procedural housekeeping such as a February letter extending the mandate of the UN Office for West Africa and the Sahel until January 2029, a May press statement condemning earlier attacks, and a request for a strategic review of that office’s mandate by September. None of this authorised, blocked, or shaped the military operations actually being carried out by regional actors who no longer wait for Council input before acting.

This gap between what the Council is formally doing and what is happening in the field has been building for well over a year, and tracing how it built up is the only way to understand why it now looks less like an anomaly and more like the way this system functions. What follows works backwards from the present moment into the practice that produced it, and then forward into what it means for how we ought to read Article 53 of the UN Charter. This provision was intended to prevent exactly this kind of autonomous regional enforcement from ever becoming the norm.

What the Charter actually requires, and why the drafters were strict about it

Without much room for creative reading, Article 53(1) states that no enforcement action shall be taken under regional arrangements or by regional agencies without the authorisation of the Security Council. This was a deliberate choice by the Charter’s drafters, made with a specific historical failure in mind: the interwar regional security pacts that operated with genuine autonomy, answered to no central body, and did nothing to prevent the war that produced the UN in 1945. The drafters wanted regional organisations as useful partners, contributing troops, expertise and local legitimacy that a distant Council could not replicate but not as independent enforcers free to commit force on their own judgment. Authorisation, in plain text, was a genuine precondition that preceded regional forces’ movement, not a formality to be arranged afterwards.

This is what separates Chapter VIII regionalism from the right of self-defence recognised under Article 51, which requires no advance Council approval because it responds to an armed attack that has already happened and cannot wait for prior clearance. Regional enforcement action occupies a distinct place within the Charter framework because it involves coercive measures capable of affecting international peace and security. Unlike reactive measures taken by individual States, enforcement undertaken through regional arrangements carries the possibility that regional political interests may diverge from the broader objectives of the United Nations. For that reason, Article 53 requires Security Council authorisation before such action is undertaken. The requirement is intended to ensure that an independent collective assessment precedes the use of force, rather than serving as a procedural endorsement after the fact.

Precision about what Article 53 captures matters, because not every regional use of force amounts to “enforcement action.” The International Court of Justice in Certain Expenses distinguished coercive enforcement from operations conducted with the consent of the state concerned. The dominant scholarly position, developed by Ugo Villani, Ademola Abass and, most recently, Erika de Wet’s work on military assistance on request, holds that consent-based deployments and internal disciplinary measures, such as suspending a member from an organisation’s organs, fall outside Article 53(1) altogether. Measured strictly, the Alliance of Sahel States (AES) strikes inside the territory of a

consenting member, or an Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) deployment made at a threatened government’s request, may never trigger the authorisation requirement at all. That is precisely what makes the current pattern worth examining: the consent-based category has quietly expanded to absorb nearly everything regional organisations now do with force, while the residual category of genuine enforcement, where the Council’s gatekeeping is supposed to bite, has been reorganised around money rather than mandates.

Nor is divergence between Article 53’s sequence and regional practice a discovery of 2025. ECOWAS intervened in Liberia in 1990 and in Sierra Leone in 1997 without prior Security Council authorisation. In neither case did the censure, the Council respond with censure; instead, it subsequently endorsed ECOWAS’s role, commending ECOMOG in Resolution 788 (1992) in relation to Liberia and expressing support for ECOWAS’s efforts in Sierra Leone through Resolution 1132 (1997). The African Union (AU) subsequently articulated what this practice appeared to imply; the 2005 Ezulwini Consensus asserted that Security Council approval for regional intervention could, in exceptional circumstances requiring urgent action, be granted “after the fact.” Likewise, Article 4(h) of the Constitutive Act of the African Union recognises a right of intervention in grave circumstances without expressly requiring prior Security Council authorisation. What distinguishes 2025 and 2026, therefore, is not the existence of regional autonomy but its institutionalisation. The ad hoc exceptionalism of the 1990s has evolved into a standing financial architecture that presumes regional deployment and asks only whether the United Nations will help finance it.

How the practice actually built up through 2025

No single event alone would constitute a doctrinal shift; the repetition over the course of a year is what makes it significant. The AES states completed their withdrawal from ECOWAS on 29 January 2025, forming a rival collective defence arrangement whose Chapter VIII status the Council has never formally addressed. After Guinea-Bissau’s military disrupted the announcement of the presidential election results on 26 November 2025, the African Union Peace and Security Council suspended the country from all AU activities on 28 November and endorsed ECOWAS’s parallel response condemning the coup and seeking the restoration of constitutional order. This decision reshaped an entire sub-region’s counter-terrorism architecture, which the Council learned about after the fact. ECOWAS itself moved toward operational independence, resolving concerns about its delayed Standby Force not through any Council resolution but through its own decision in September to ready 1,650 personnel as a Rapid Deployment Force beginning in 2026, funded through a mixture of ECOWAS’s own resources and, prospectively, UN-assessed contributions under Resolution 2719.

The closing months of the year hardened the pattern. When Guinea-Bissau’s military disrupted the announcement of the presidential election results on 26 November, the AU Peace and Security Council suspended the country within 48 hours, and ECOWAS followed immediately. Suspensions are internal institutional sanctions; no serious reading of Article 53 treats them as enforcement action; the telling detail lies elsewhere. When Council members attempted even a simple press statement condemning the coup, the regional response was the only substantive institutional reaction to the crisis. Twelve days later, when officers attempted to overthrow the government of Benin on 7 December, the Chair of the ECOWAS Authority authorised deployment of the Standby Force itself, drawing troops from four member states to preserve Benin’s constitutional order. A deployment at the apparent request of the threatened government is arguably consent-based. Outside Article 53’s strict scope, yet ECOWAS treated prior Council involvement as irrelevant, even as a diplomatic courtesy. By the November briefing, the Secretary-General was describing the Sahel as accounting for nineteen per cent of global terrorist attacks and over half of all terrorism-related deaths, a scale of insecurity managed almost entirely outside the authorisation structure the Charter describes.

The financing mechanism that made the shift possible without anyone having to say so

None of this would be sustainable as a settled arrangement without Resolution 2719, adopted in December 2023, which permits UN-assessed contributions to finance up to seventy-five per cent of African Union-led peace support operations. Its mechanics are subtler than either its defenders or its critics allow. On its text, 2719 does contain an authorisation node: assessed contributions flow only to operations the Council authorises on a case-by-case basis, on conditions of joint AU–UN planning and reporting, and indeed the framework has never yet been activated, after the attempt to apply it to the AU mission in Somalia collapsed in May 2025 against United States objections. Formally, then, the Council has surrendered nothing.

And yet the structural effect is precisely the relocation this piece concerns. The Rapid Deployment Force deploys on ECOWAS’s own timeline and under its own authority, regardless of what the Council eventually funds; the AES strikes proceed under the Liptako-Gourma Charter; and whether an ECOWAS force even qualifies as “AU-led” under 2719 remains an open interpretive question. What the Council decides, when it decides anything, is no longer whether a given force may deploy, where Article 53(1)’s legal gravity actually sits, but whether the UN will help pay for a force whose deployment has been determined elsewhere. This is not an administrative wrinkle; it is a structural substitution of financial conditionality for legal authorisation, and because Resolution 2719 was adopted through the Council’s ordinary powers rather than any formal amendment to Article 53, nobody within the UN system has had to state plainly, on the record, that this substitution is taking place. Even the joint mechanism through which the AU Peace and Security Council and ECOWAS’s Mediation and Security Council agreed in May 2025 to expedite operationalisation of both organisations’ standby forces was a decision taken entirely outside any Security Council process.

There is precedent for such a quiet constitutional movement. In Certain Expenses (1962), the ICJ accepted that settled institutional practice, once consistent and unchallenged by the membership, can expand an organ’s functional competence beyond a narrow reading of the Charter’s text. More pointedly, in the Namibia advisory opinion (1971), the Court endorsed the Council’s practice of treating a permanent member’s voluntary abstention as not defeating a resolution, despite Article 27(3)’s requirement of “concurring votes”: consistent, unchallenged practice effectively rewriting the Charter procedure. Resolution 2719 looks like that mechanism operating in reverse: not an organ acquiring powers. Still, the Council quietly relinquishes its prior authorisation function to regional bodies, retaining a financial veto that arrives well after the operational decisions have been made and acted upon.

Why nobody with standing to object is actually raising the objection that matters

The honest legal difficulty is that none of this practice satisfies Article 53(1) as written, whatever pragmatic sense it makes, given the Council’s paralysis. Silence is not authorisation in any formal sense. A blocked press statement is not ratification. Financing an operation after it has deployed is not the same legal act as approving it before it deploys, and treating the two as interchangeable requires either ignoring the Charter’s text or reading into it a flexibility its drafters plainly did not intend.

International law does, however, have a vocabulary for what unchallenged divergence can and cannot accomplish. Article 31(3)(b) of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties directs interpreters to take account of subsequent practice establishing the agreement of the parties regarding a treaty’s interpretation, and the International Law Commission’s 2018 conclusions on subsequent agreements and subsequent practice accept that such practice can shape interpretation while cautioning, in Conclusion 7(3), that the possibility of a treaty being modified by practice “has not been generally recognized.” Silence, moreover, counts toward acquiescence only where the circumstances called for a reaction from states in a position to react. That is the precise legal question the Sahel practice now poses: whether what is accumulating is authoritative interpretation, informal modification, or merely tolerated breach.

This is what makes the current moment worth watching rather than dismissing as Council dysfunction. Russia’s interventions throughout the 2025 Sahel debates are telling because they are not objections to the legality of ECOWAS or AU action under Article 53 at all. They are objections to sanctions and exclusion as political tools, framed around sovereignty and non-interference, with Russia’s representative going so far as to urge the Council to respect the AES states’ own choice to leave ECOWAS rather than arguing that ECOWAS had exceeded any legal authority. Mali’s representative similarly protested what he described as hostile external interference in a sovereign country but did not argue that ECOWAS’s posture required prior Council blessing, which it had failed to obtain. The states most inclined to challenge ECOWAS and the AU are simply not making the formal Article 53 argument available to them, and nobody at the Council table appears interested in raising it. That sustained absence of objection, repeated across coup after coup and deployment after deployment into 2026, is doing real legal work even though it produces no resolution, no press statement, and no paper trail.

What does this mean for reading the Council’s role in 2026

Which returns us to where this piece began: a July 2026 briefing on a region where the Council’s own partners now conduct air strikes without seeking its input. The UN’s authority here is not eroding through simple irrelevance; it is being renegotiated through a specific, identifiable mechanism: the substitution of retrospective financing for prospective authorisation, tolerated by accumulated silence rather than blessed by any resolution that acknowledges it. Even ECOWAS’s institutional transition, with Sierra Leone due to its rotating chairmanship to Senegal and a new Commission President taking over for the 2026 to 2030 term at the organisation’s July summit in Freetown, suggests an organisation settling into this expanded role as ordinary institutional continuity rather than an exceptional response to an exceptional moment.

Honesty also requires acknowledging why many African states regard this evolution as adaptation rather than erosion. The Council’s veto-driven paralysis over Guinea-Bissau is a pattern, not an aberration, and the subsidiarity claim of African solutions to African problems, underlying both Article 4(h) and the Ezulwini position, rests on the reasonable premise that organisations proximate to a crisis respond faster than a divided Council in New York. On that reading, Resolution 2719 is not the Council relinquishing anything; it is the Council finally building plumbing for a settlement regional practice reached decades ago. The Charter-based objection nonetheless retains its force: a body that can only ratify, through funding, what it cannot prevent through law has lost the independent, ex ante judgment that Article 53 was written to interpose.

Whether this shift deserves to be welcomed, as a pragmatic adaptation to a Council too often paralysed to act with the speed the Sahel demands, or resisted, as erosion of the one Charter provision designed to prevent regional blocs from becoming unchecked enforcement actors answerable to nobody, remains a genuinely open question deserving a more direct answer than the silence it has received. Nor is the question parochial to Africa. For Southeast Asia, where ASEAN’s non-interference norm has kept comparable enforcement questions largely theoretical and for the wider Global South debate over Security Council reform and equitable representation, the Sahel is quietly writing the precedent for the next regional organisation that decides it cannot wait for New York. It is the question international lawyers ought to be examining now. At the same time, the practice is still visibly forming and recognisable as a departure from the Charter’s text, rather than having hardened into something closer to settled custom than anyone quite consciously decided it should become.