The security landscape across West Africa and the Sahel is becoming increasingly difficult to understand through traditional distinctions between organized crime, terrorism, insurgency, corruption, and illicit trade. Today, these threats increasingly overlap. Criminal organizations, terrorist groups, armed militias, gangs, corrupt officials, and external actors exploit many of the same routes, financial systems, governance gaps, and illicit markets. The result is what can best be understood as criminal-threat convergence: individually dangerous threats combining to create a far more potent challenge to regional stability.
This convergence was a central theme of my recent remarks during the Legal Compass Series webinar in Abuja hosted by the Nigerian Financial Intelligence Unit (NFIU). The discussion brought to the forefront an increasingly urgent security reality in West Africa: governments can no longer afford to examine individual forms of criminality and converging threats in isolation.
Illicit Economies as Threat Multipliers
Illicit economies provide the connective tissue linking many of these security challenges. Corruption, illicit trade, trafficking, and money laundering do more than generate criminal profits. They create enabling environments in which terrorist organizations, armed groups, gangs, and other threat networks can operate, finance themselves, corrupt institutions, and expand territorial influence.
Across West Africa, illicit networks traffic narcotics, people, weapons, counterfeit medicines, tobacco, alcohol, stolen oil, illegally mined gold, critical minerals, wildlife, timber, and other commodities. The problem is not simply the scale of these individual markets. It is their interconnectedness and the ability of sophisticated criminal actors and other threat networks to diversify across multiple illicit activities.
Corruption magnifies the threat. Traffickers can exploit relationships with political and security elites to establish trafficking corridors, protect shipments, avoid scrutiny, and convert criminal proceeds into legitimate businesses and political influence. In extreme cases, illicit actors can begin hollowing out institutions from within, weakening the very governments responsible for combating them.
Terrorism and Organized Crime Increasingly Intersect
The consequences are particularly serious where illicit economies intersect with violent extremism.
Militants from the Sahel and criminal bandit networks have increasingly pushed toward southern and coastal areas of West Africa. Nigeria is confronting these converging pressures while simultaneously dealing with longstanding insurgent and terrorist threats. Groups such as Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM), the Islamic State, and Boko Haram can exploit weak governance and ungoverned spaces to establish influence, control territory, attack strategic infrastructure, and undermine state legitimacy.
Terrorist and extremist organizations also benefit directly from illicit economies. Extortion and predatory taxation—including forced zakat imposed on herders, transportation networks, and businesses—can generate wealth and resources that sustain militant operations. Illicit gold, fuel trafficking, kidnapping, arms trafficking, cattle rustling, and other criminal markets further contribute to an ecosystem in which violence and illicit commerce reinforce one another.
This convergence creates a vicious cycle. Insecurity weakens governance and law enforcement, creating more opportunities for illicit markets. Those markets then generate resources that allow armed and criminal groups to expand their influence, purchase weapons, corrupt officials, and challenge government authority.
Technology is Transforming Illicit Networks
Criminal networks are also becoming increasingly technologically sophisticated.
Modern trafficking organizations use commercial aircraft, drones, fishing vessels, container ships, encrypted communications, and digital technologies to transport illicit commodities and move their profits. Technology allows networks to operate across jurisdictions while making traditional distinctions between domestic and international criminality increasingly obsolete.
These developments require governments to think differently about intelligence collection. Mapping illicit trade hubs, trafficking routes, risk zones, financial flows, and the convergence of criminal organizations, violent extremists, terrorists, and corrupt facilitators can provide a more comprehensive picture of the threat environment.
Financial intelligence is particularly important because the scale of the illicit economy is enormous. ICAIE research estimates that illicit markets and illicit financial flows could represent approximately 2–5 percent of global GDP, potentially reaching trillions of dollars annually. These proceeds give criminal and threat networks enormous resources with which to corrupt institutions, finance violence, and expand operations.
Follow the Money
For this reason, attacking the financial foundations of criminal-threat networks should be at the center of an effective response.
Financial Intelligence Units (FIUs) can play a decisive role in identifying illicit financial flows, exposing facilitators, tracing criminal assets, and disrupting the relationships connecting transnational organized crime with terrorist and other threat networks.
The objective should not simply be to arrest individual traffickers or militants. Governments and their partners must target the broader infrastructure that enables these networks to survive: their financing, logistics, command-and-control systems, front companies, trafficking corridors, facilitators, and access to legitimate and underground financial systems.
Precision intelligence and data overlays should increasingly inform military, economic, financial, and law-enforcement operations. Understanding where illicit markets intersect with terrorist activity, corruption, and weak governance can help authorities move from reacting to individual incidents toward anticipating where threats are likely to emerge.
A Shared Security Challenge: Full Spectrum Dominance
No country can confront these networks alone. Criminal and terrorist organizations – and opportunistic malign actors such as Russia’s state-controlled paramilitary expeditionary force – the Africa Corps – deliberately exploit borders and differences between national legal, financial, and enforcement systems to seize power and expand illicit economies. Effective responses therefore require deeper cooperation among FIUs, law enforcement agencies, intelligence services, militaries, the private sector, civil society, and international partners.
Information sharing is particularly critical. Governments and trusted partners must develop mechanisms for converting financial, criminal, border, commercial, and security information into actionable intelligence capable of disrupting threat networks across multiple jurisdictions.
Public-private partnerships also have an increasingly important role. Financial institutions, logistics companies, technology firms, shipping companies, and other private-sector actors often possess information that can help authorities identify suspicious transactions, illicit shipments, shell companies, and emerging trafficking patterns.
Ultimately, West Africa and the Sahel face more than separate problems of terrorism, organized crime, corruption, illicit trade, and authoritarian-inspired chaos. They face an interconnected security ecosystem in which each threat can strengthen the others.
The strategic response must therefore be equally integrated through full spectrum dominance. Building resilient institutions, strengthening international cooperation, improving financial intelligence, mapping illicit economies and hubs of illicit trade, and targeting the infrastructure and financing of threat networks can make it riskier, harder, and more costly for these actors to operate.
The goal should be straightforward: deny criminals, terrorists, and other threat networks the illicit wealth, logistical infrastructure, institutional protection, and permissive environments they require to thrive. In an era of criminal-threat convergence, security policy must evolve from confronting individual threats to dismantling the ecosystems that sustain them.
