More than 1,000 metric tons of yellowcake uranium sit at Airbase 101 adjacent to Niamey’s international airport, loaded onto trucks that have not moved in weeks, a convoy that has become a defining image of a world order in transition. By every conventional understanding of territorial sovereignty, this asset is Niger’s to do with as it pleases. The junta seized the Somair mine outside Arlit, nationalized it, expelled the French operator Orano, and declared it would sell the uranium on international markets under its own terms. It has a buyer which is almost certainly Russia. It has soldiers, trucks, and a head of state willing to defy international arbitration tribunals, a French criminal investigation, and international nonproliferation obligations.
And yet the uranium has gone nowhere.
The temptation is to explain the stalemate only through logistics, such as the closed border with Benin, the jihadist-threatened potential route through Burkina Faso, the Russian vessel that waited off the Port of Lomé for weeks and then left empty. But these are symptoms, not causes. The deeper question is structural: What does this stalemate reveal about the limits to sovereign power in the fracturing liberal international order?
The answer is both clarifying and unsettling. Niger’s junta discovered something that will matter for every resource-rich state testing the limits of the new era: seizing a territorial asset and monetizing it beyond its borders are two fundamentally different exercises of sovereignty. The first is available to almost any state willing to accept the political costs, whether domestic or international. The second requires authority over things that move across other states’ jurisdictions, and that authority cannot simply be seized.
What the convoy reveals fits a pattern that could be described as the emerging Mad Max world order, one in which the coercive logic of territorial control is reasserting itself against the rules-based architecture of global commerce, but unevenly and with results that no one fully controls.
The Continuing Salience of Territory
Niger’s nationalization of the Somair mine was, on its own terms, a success. The mine is an asset that sits within Niger’s borders and seizing it required coercive capacity that Niger possesses as a sovereign state, particularly after the withdrawal of American and French counterterrorism forces eliminated any possibility of Western protection for the French investment. However, the seizure involved more than just coercive state power. It also leveraged anti-Western discourses at home and relied on the junta’s calculation that the international costs would be manageable.
The legitimacy argument drew on a long and continually potent regional tradition of postcolonial resource nationalism. When junta leader Gen. Abdourahamane Tchiani declared an end to decades of French control of the Arlit mine, he was narrating a story with deep roots in African political culture that resonates not just in Niger but across the Sahel’s coup belt. The junta framed the seizure not as theft but as the recovery of stolen wealth, a framing that carried a potent us-versus-them psychological force.
The compelling nature of the narrative within the region relies on the enduring nature of France’s neo-colonial structure, which still dominates much of Francophone Africa’s political and economic life. Despite decolonization over 60 years ago, Niger and many of its neighbors have relied upon France for economic security, as France has backed up currency regimes in Central and West Africa, while co-locating half of these regimes’ currency reserves in Paris, a requirement removed for West Africa in 2019 but still in force for Central Africa. This security has extended to natural resources, where France acted as the primary mover in a variety of resource extraction projects—albeit in terms that favored Paris.
Much of the anti-French sentiment in West Africa today remains anchored to France’s continued role in the continent’s economic life, even as this arrangement has sustained elites in Francophone capitals across the continent. Yet, the Sahel’s recent coups suggest that populations wish to see a renegotiation, or perhaps a complete overhaul, of the neo-colonial relationship with Paris. However, such a realignment means that African partners can lose access to market controls, ease of access, and global transport nodes previously made available by France.
The junta’s calculation about international repercussions was made easier by the broader erosion of the rules-based international order that we and others have written about. A decade ago, a combination of international arbitration, diplomatic pressure, potential sanctions, and the credible threat of Western economic isolation might have been sufficient to deter the move. Today, with great power competition fracturing Western unity, with Russia, China, Turkey, and others offering alternative economic and security relationships, and with the Trump administration signaling the end of development-focused engagement with Africa, the penalties associated with rule-breaking can seem more avoidable than they once did. Mali and Burkina Faso had already run similar plays with their own gold mines with little consequence and each success lowered the threshold for the next. Niger’s seizure was, in this sense, a wager on the salience of territorial thinking.
The wager paid off to a point. The mine is still Niger’s and Orano has no realistic prospect of reclaiming it. Niger’s recent offer to return Orano’s proportional share of the stranded stockpile shows the junta is not retreating. It is merely disposing of inventory it cannot circulate, while retaining the nationalized mine and every ton produced since it took control. The territorial exercise is settled and Niger holds the ground.
The Problem of Networks
Territory, as the quintessential geographical expression of politics, works by twinning authority with a bounded, fixed space. In short, control is affixed to the land itself, to anything attached to it and, in this case, to resources beneath it. States exercise territorial control through physical presence: soldiers, courts, infrastructure. Niger has all of that. However, what territorial control does not fully govern are flows. Flows, such as the movement of goods, cargo, people, and money across borders and through intermediary nodes, operate under a different logic. They are networked rather than territorial, distributed across multiple jurisdictions and dependent on the cooperation of actors, none of whom owns the whole chain.
Uranium in a truck at a military airbase is only potential wealth until it can be sold. Since there is no domestic market for uranium within Niger, realizing its potential requires something the junta cannot obtain by force: the ability to make things flow through networks that transcend other territories and cross their borders. These flows are the flip side to territory and have become a problem for Niger.
Unlike gold in neighboring Mali or Burkina Faso that can be easily smuggled abroad in suitcases and melted down for purchase in one of Dubai’s gold souks, uranium is a much more difficult material to move and sell. For the Nigerien junta, reaching global markets means traveling corridors controlled by other states, or in the case of Burkina Faso, heavily threatened by insurgents. The cargo must pass through a port, a kind of networked node that remains subject to shipping control regimes, insurance requirements, and end-user verification systems built up over decades to govern precisely this kind of movement. The uranium must be loaded onto a ship, and maritime shipping operates under a web of international regulation, commercial insurance, and financial clearing systems that are very difficult to bypass.
Each of these is a chokepoint governed by rules that Niger’s territorial sovereignty cannot reach.
The specific failure points in the junta’s plan are informative. Benin offered the safest overland route to the Atlantic, but Niger closed that border in 2023 and cannot reopen it without concessions that would cost Tchiani politically among his AES junta allies in Mali and Burkina Faso, and internally with a loss of face to his own political rivals. The coup attempt in Cotonou, whose plotters used language echoing the Sahel juntas and whose leader subsequently fled to Niamey, suggest an attempted territorial solution to the network problem by installing a more compliant government in Benin. However, France pushed back, providing special forces support for anti-coup operations backed up by Nigerian air power. Thus, France showed that not only could it protect its clients, the Beninese government of Patrice Talon, but that it could also block Niger’s uranium export attempts by military means. Thus the Beninese gambit failed, and the border remains closed.
The Burkina Faso route runs through territory where al-Qaeda’s Sahelian affiliate, Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin, treats the region’s sparse highways as revenue streams and has been experimenting with drone-delivered explosives. This is not a corridor that the junta can secure by the same apparatus that seized a mine. Indeed, Niger’s ally Burkina Faso has failed to secure its own sovereignty, with its own attempts at circumvention of the international rules-based order, via the forced withdrawal of French counterterrorism forces, resulting in a breakdown of its own economic and political system outside the capital, Ouagadougou.
Togo and its Port of Lomé, the apparent destination, initially seemed a viable option. But Orano’s decision to launch a criminal complaint in France for the suspected theft of nuclear materials “in the interests of a foreign power” changed the calculus abruptly. As a Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons signatory, Togo has overlapping obligations under the agreement and UN Security Council resolutions requiring states to intercept illicit nuclear transfers. Once the Paris prosecutor formally labeled the cargo as stolen property, a willing transit state became a liability in the network overnight. Even Russia’s waiting bulk carrier eventually abandoned its anchorage off Lomé and departed empty.
The pattern is consistent. At every point where the uranium has to move from Niger’s territory into the networked infrastructure of global commerce, the old rules-based order asserts residual friction. Not enough friction to undo the seizure but still enough to resist the completion of the sovereign act and reward Niger with payment for its exports.
The Sovereignty Gap
What Niger has encountered is a structural feature of the contemporary international system, though one that has started to function very unevenly. Although the old rules-based system upheld territorial sovereignty as the core principle of world order, it embedded itself most durably in the networked infrastructure of global commerce. And when the norms of territorial sovereignty were contested and at times openly violated, political actors who could not be coerced territorially could be curbed or constrained by the governance of flows: international control regimes, maritime insurance markets, financial clearing systems, export licensing frameworks, end-user certification requirements, and so on. Flows through the networked architecture of this system still offer checkpoints with residual weight. They are also precisely where minor powers, like Niger, are most exposed.
A state that seizes a mine acquires an asset. But to convert that asset into revenue, it must traverse networks it does not govern and that were specifically designed, over decades, to be difficult to circumvent. The result is a gap between territorial possession and networked realization and, for states like Niger, a gap that cannot be closed through the same means by which the mine was seized.
This gap explains Russia’s role in this story more precisely than the financial framing suggests. Niger does not simply need Russia’s money. It needs Russia’s position. Niger has coercive power within its territory but not over the networks that cross it. A handful of states occupy a fundamentally different position in the international system, one in which territorial and networked power reinforce rather than constrain each other.
The United States is the clearest current example. Following the Trump administration’s detention of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, Washington cut off Venezuelan oil shipments to Cuba and threatened tariffs against any country that attempted to fill the gap. The result is a fuel blockade that the United Nations has warned risks a humanitarian crisis and that several members of Congress have described as an act of war under international law. It persists regardless of those objections because American power extends simultaneously across territory and the global networks of shipping lanes, financial clearing systems, and port access regimes that circulate oil.
Cuba, like Niger, lacks the ability to circumvent that aspect of the rules-based order and other more powerful potential partners, even those sympathetic to Cuba’s plight, are unwilling to help it do so. Russia rejects the blockade as illegitimate while aspiring to a position similar to the United States. The Niger convoy is an early test of whether Russia’s position is yet sufficient to bridge it. What it reveals, at least so far, is the difference between rejecting the Western rules-based order and having built something capable of replacing it.
What This Means
The uranium’s current immobility is not a triumph of the rules-based order. The mine is still seized and Orano has no realistic legal recourse. Niger’s recent offer to return Orano’s proportional share of the stranded stockpile confirms that the junta is releasing only what the network refused to let it sell. The junta’s territorial legitimacy is otherwise undimmed. If Niger finds a workaround, perhaps by an airlift through willing airspace (another form of territory), it will establish a precedent that makes the next seizure, in Niger or elsewhere, easier to complete. Africa’s juntas and other small state authoritarians are likely watching this experiment with rapt attention.
What the convoy’s stalemate does reveal is where the residual leverage of the old order actually lies. It lies not in territorial pressure but in the networked nodes through which strategic materials must flow to have value. Ports. Airports. Insurers. Financiers. Markets. Transit states with something to lose.
This suggests a more targeted and realistic approach for any external actor trying to manage the proliferation of such gambits. The relevant diplomacy is not about the mine, but about the exits. Togo’s decisions matter. So do Libya’s, Turkey’s, and any other state that might provide refueling, transshipment, or safe harbor. The insurers, financiers, and port services firms that make sanctions-running commercially viable can be pressured. None of this requires the pretense of developing the Sahel or reversing the coups. It requires understanding that networked leverage, where it persists, is the last load-bearing element of the order that is otherwise receding.
The deeper lesson of the convoy, therefore, is not about Niger specifically. It is about the architecture of a world in transition. In the Mad Max world order, territorial sovereignty is more accessible to weaker states than it has been in decades. Networked sovereignty is not. That asymmetry is not an accident of Niger’s landlocked geography or Tchiani’s choices. It is the structural condition of the transition itself.
That gap between what can be seized and what can be circulated is the defining tension of the world order now taking shape. Niger’s uranium convoy, sitting immobile on a Sahelian airstrip, is its most vivid current expression.