Across cross global politics, the rehabilitation of the rule of the strong has become increasingly visible. From Donald Trump in the United States to Vladimir Putin in Russia, or Viktor Orbán in Hungary, political authority is increasingly framed through performances of masculine strength, moral conservatism and the rejection of institutional constraints.
Far from being an anomaly, the rise of military strongmen in the Sahel forms part of this broader global backlash against liberal democratic norms and the rules-based order – one in which virility, coercion and sovereignty are mobilised as key sources of political legitimacy.
Since 2020, a series of military coups has reconfigured political authority across the Central Sahel. Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger are governed by juntas that justify their rule through narratives of security, sovereignty and national restoration. These developments are often analysed as responses to security failures, geopolitical realignment, or anti-colonial backlash. While these explanations capture important dynamics, they overlook a central dimension of how power is increasingly structured, legitimised and exercised in the region: strongman leadership, or virility politics. This article argues that political expressions of aggressive masculinities are central to the transformations of governance observed in the Sahel.
Strongman politics refers to a style of leadership that draws legitimacy from performances of masculine strength – dominance, decisiveness, coercion, authority and the capacity to impose and enforce – while explicitly portraying compromise, deliberation and inclusion as signs of weakness that carry the risk of slowness and hesitation. In the Sahelian context, this “virility politics” is more than rhetorical: it structures how authority is claimed, how violence and repression are justified and how political participation is organized.
The politics of virility: gender as a political order
Gender relations constitute a society’s “first political order”. Patterns of authority within the household and community – particularly male dominance over women and youth – shape broader political expectations. Research has evidenced that when hierarchy and control are normalised in everyday life, coercive governance and personalised authority are more readily accepted at the state level[1].
A context of military governance deepens this tendency: it glorifies “toughness” as a virtue of “true leadership”, dismisses diplomacy, consultation and civilian participation as empty talk and justifies coercive practices, whether inter- or intra-state, as necessary for national survival.
In doing so, virility politics also constrains how conflict can be addressed. By presenting force as the only valid, “manly” response, it sidelines dialogue, mediation and negotiated grievance resolution. Instead, militarised responses persist despite their structural limitations. Militarism, in this sense, is not a neutral policy choice but a gendered political logic.
Sahelian military regimes operate within social orders marked by strong patriarchal and hierarchical conceptions of authority often associated with male seniority. Authority is culturally linked to male control and the capacity to impose order without being questioned. Even when junta leaders are relatively young, they govern through vertical and disciplinary registers that draw on these gerontocratic imaginaries of command and obedience.
Within this framework, rights are easily treated as secondary: the promised restoration of order and national dignity takes precedence over accountability and contestation, which become acceptable sacrifices.
Performing authority: how virility politics manifests
Across Sahelian junta-led states, virility politics is visible in concrete governing practices. First in the scenography of power. Military leaders frequently appear in uniform, even when addressing administrative or economic matters, collapsing the distinction between civilian authority and coercive power.
This martial stagecraft is most evident in the classic image of a group of military men in fatigues – no woman is ever part of the picture – announcing their takeover on public television, but it also becomes part of a normalised imagery when junta rulers make a habit of governing in such attire. It acts as a constant reminder that the country is at war and hence “strong men” are needed to defend it.
Second, in speech. Since he grabbed power in 2022, Burkina Faso’s Ibrahim Traoré has repeatedly framed the fight against insurgents as a test of national resolve and sovereign dignity, portraying resistance as central to the country’s identity. This narrative is regularly echoed in government statements supporting the mobilisation of the Volunteers for the Defense of the Homeland (Volontaires pour la Défense de la Patrie, VDP) amid repeated jihadist attacks, reinforcing a discourse that equates firmness with legitimacy.
That Traore’s rhetoric regularly emphasizes strength and endurance is no coincidence. It’s an example of deliberate political messaging that glorifies sacrifice, discipline and resolve on the one hand, while framing dissent as betrayal, cowardice, or manipulation by external forces on the other hand. This framework reinforces hierarchical authority: power is demonstrated not through influencing, persuasion, or coalition-building, but through the ability to silence, shame and punish. No wonder that, in Niger, General Abdourahmane Tchiani has described political challenges in terms of “discipline” and “determination,” portraying dissent or negotiation as incompatible with national unity.
Third, in policy choices. Mali’s military-led government framed its decision to expel France in 2022 and the United Nations’ mission MINUSMA in 2023 as a way to restore national dignity and reclaim sovereign control over security decisions – implicitly framing foreign partnerships as emasculating compromises rather than valid cooperative options. This works because a sense of dispossession or public humiliation functions as a key disciplinary tool in virility-based political systems.
Across the region, supranational organisations that insist on democratic norms, even selectively, such as the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), are presented as external enemies that question national sovereignty, while political opponents, journalists and civil society actors who call for pluralism are portrayed as enemies from within, manipulated by outsiders and betraying national interests for foreign agendas. Notions of honour versus humiliation and self-drive versus subordination, are a central feature of masculine pride in both patriarchal cultures and virility politics.
The narrowing of civic space under Sahelian juntas is therefore not only a tool of political control; it is inherently gendered. Civil society actors, journalists and independent voices are routinely portrayed as weak, divisive or detached from the “real” struggle for national survival. Calls for accountability, dialogue or restraint are reframed as softness at best and betrayal at worst. In this framing, silencing dissent becomes an act of discipline rather than repression — a way of restoring order by reasserting authority –framed as protection, a traditional male responsibility – coded as masculine.
Women’s organisations are particularly exposed to this logic, as their advocacy for rights, inclusion and social reform directly challenges the gender hierarchy on which virility politics rests.
The gendered dimension of (geo)political sovereignty
Virility politics also shapes how geopolitical realignment is narrated. In Mali, pro-junta discourse has at times described France’s opposition to Bamako’s partnership with Russia through a polygamy metaphor: France cast as the “first wife” expressing jealousy when “second wife” Russia brought in.
Beyond the trivial sexist joke, this framing is analytically revealing. It masculinises sovereignty as male entitlement, feminises and ridicules critique as emotional excess and draws on widely shared patriarchal assumptions to legitimise strategic choice. Incidentally, it also flatters Mali’s pride by positioning the country as “the man” in the story.
Such metaphors are politically meaningful, but they often go unnoticed. They translate complex geopolitical shifts into familiar gender hierarchies, feminising external partners to symbolically invert power relations. Through this lens, anti-colonial politics is framed less as a project of equality than as a display of masculine dominance used to restore national pride.
In addition, seen from the Sahel’s conservative social viewpoint, the authoritarianism, misogyny and homophobia of Putin’s Russia are interpreted as signals of moral purity, preserved honour and masculine strength. By contrast, the West’s insistence on individual rights, gender equality and sexual freedom is seen not only as moral decay and civilizational weakening, but also as a form of political interference – the export of a liberal rights model perceived as a foreign agenda.
Arguably, the convergence of conservative values, combined with the rejection of Western normative conditionality, is an underestimated factor to shaping the strategic partnership choices of Bamako, Niamey and Ouagadougou.
Women, youth and the boundaries of inclusion
Virility politics has direct implications for political inclusion, too. While juntas frequently invoke “the people” and occasionally convene “national dialogues or consultations”, participation is actually controlled, choreographed and sharply stratified.
As repeated appeals from Burkina Faso’s Ibrahim Traoré show, youth are mobilised as fighters in nationalist discourse, but rarely as autonomous political actors with decision-making power. Inclusion takes the form of masculine recognition rather than substantive citizenship.
Women’s participation follows a similar pattern. Female figures are presented symbolically in roles that reproduce stereotypes of “good femininity”: they are called upon as “mothers of the nation”, peace messengers, or moral anchors. But their political agency remains constrained. Gender equality is often reframed as a secondary concern, a social issue, or a foreign agenda ill-suited to times of war or at odds with context specific traditions. This produces a form of symbolic inclusion that leaves existing hierarchies intact and instead uses tokenism to silence equality demands.
This is not incidental. Gender hierarchy lowers the political cost of exclusion by making unequal authority appear normal. Meaningful inclusion would require renegotiating the very foundations of legitimacy – that is, forceful masculine authority – on which junta rule rests.
Why virility politics resonates
The appeal of virility politics and strongman leadership is not accidental. It is rooted in how insecurity, coercion and masculine authority intersect.
Virility politics resonates in the Sahel because it speaks to contexts marked by prolonged insecurity, social fragmentation and political disillusionment. Years of violence, weak service delivery and repeated governance failures have eroded trust in civilian institutions. Sanctions and diplomatic isolation have further reinforced narratives of humiliation and abandonment.
Against this backdrop, leadership framed around toughness, discipline and the commitment to impose order domestically and command respect internationally appears protective and reassuring. By contrast, approaches based on dialogue, compromise or inclusion – the tenants of democracy – are often portrayed as ineffective, naïve and weak – in other words, feminine.
Moreover, juntas use the virility script to promise restored dignity, clarity and purpose to young men experiencing economic marginalisation, social stagnation and loss of status. Masculine authority becomes a substitute for effective governance: where states cannot deliver welfare or justice, they deliver symbolic strength and a restored image of masculine domination instead.
This dynamic helps explain why authoritarian practices can gain social acceptance even when they fail to deliver security. When protection is defined in masculine terms, coercion becomes easier to justify, dissent easier to delegitimise and political pluralism easier to sideline. Virility politics thus transform frustration into consent – not because it works, but because it feels good.
It also explains why external pressure often reinforces rather than weakens junta narratives. Sanctions, condemnations, or public criticism are easily reframed as attempted humiliation by outsiders, triggering further performances of sovereign virility. The result is a tightening of authority rather than accommodation.
Implications for understanding Sahelian politics
Viewing Sahelian junta regimes through the lens of virility politics shifts the analytical focus from institutional breakdown to regime legitimation. These governments are not only authoritarian; they are gendered political orders that rely on public displays of traditional masculinity to consolidate power. Security, sovereignty and conservative morality are fused into a single narrative of protection that leaves little room for pluralism or egalitarian participation.
This is not cultural determinism. Gender orders are political constructions and they can evolve. But it does suggest that transitions away from military rule will require more than electoral timelines or technocratic adjustments. They will require alternative sources of legitimacy capable of replacing virility as the primary currency of authority. Such shifts can’t come from the outside.
They are more likely to emerge when a critical mass of citizens – including men – recognise that performances of strength do not deliver security, services or dignity and begin to question a model of authority that feels reassuring but consistently fails in practice.Ignoring the gendered foundations of authority means misunderstanding how power actually works in today’s Sahel. Virility politics endures not because it delivers, but because it hits the right spot in a public opinion marked by fear and frustration.
As long as masculinity is associated with domination and discipline and femininity with weakness, care or compromise, authoritarianism will continue to present itself as credible, while democratic politics is dismissed as naïve or ineffective. Reversing this dynamic requires more than policy reform. It requires challenging the narratives that make strength feel legitimate and participation feel expendable – in the Sahel, but also beyond.
Ornella Moderan is a ISPI Associate Research Fellow and Senior Advisor at DCAF.
[1] Valerie M. Hudson, Donna Lee Bowen, and P. Lynne Nielsen, The First Political Order: How Sex Shapes Governance and National Security Worldwide (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020)
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