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Paper short abstract

Mali illustrates how multipolar competition reshapes development and security. This paper analyses China–US–France triangular diplomacy and how Malian actors use shifting alliances to renegotiate power, sovereignty and development futures.

Paper long abstract

Mali has become a key site for understanding how multipolar competition reshapes development, security governance and political agency in the Sahel. This paper examines Mali through the lens of strategic triangular diplomacy, focusing on interactions among China, the United States and France, and how Malian actors navigate these shifting relationships. While France has long dominated Mali’s security–development nexus, recent political crises and rising anti-French sentiment have unsettled long-standing hierarchies. China has expanded its role through infrastructure financing, economic partnerships and participation in MINUSMA, offering a “non-interference” model of development attractive to Malian elites. The United States continues to shape security governance, yet its influence has weakened amid democratic backsliding and curtailed cooperation with the ruling junta.

The paper explores three questions: (1) how triangular interactions among China, the US and France reconfigure power relations and development priorities in Mali; (2) what forms of agency Malian political elites, regional organisations and local communities exercise within and against these configurations; and (3) whether multipolarity opens space for more sovereign and just development futures, or instead produces new dependencies.

The paper argues that Mali’s rulers increasingly deploy a sovereignty-first narrative—framed through decolonial language—to renegotiate external partnerships and reduce Western conditionalities. Yet this shift may substitute one hierarchy for another, as new dependencies emerge through Chinese financing and Russian security support. By situating Mali within wider debates on decolonising development, geopolitics and African agency, the paper shows that multipolarity expands room for manoeuvre but does not automatically generate transformative or equitable development pathways.