In July 2023 members of the Presidential Guard detained President Mohamed Bazoum, and General Abdourahamane Tiani, the Guard's commander, emerged as head of the new military government. The coup was justified on the grounds that the civilian administration had failed against the jihadist insurgency spreading through the Sahel. ECOWAS responded with heavy sanctions and a threat of military intervention, a response widely judged to have backfired: rather than reversing the coup, it pushed Niger towards Mali and Burkina Faso, both already under military rule, and hardened all three against the regional body. The junta then ended the French military presence and later the American one, and turned to Russia for security assistance. That is how Africa Corps - the Russian state-directed successor to the Wagner Group's operations in Africa - came to be based at Niamey, and why its presence at Base 101 made the August 2026 mutiny more than an internal army affair. The mutineers were described by state media as hundreds of disaffected soldiers, and the grievance most often cited is battlefield attrition: the insurgency the coup was meant to fix has not been fixed, and the losses fall on the rank and file.

Three things make Niger's instability a global rather than a local concern. The first is uranium: the deposits around Arlit have supplied European nuclear power for decades, and control over them is a live question in the reordering of the country's foreign partnerships. The second is the security vacuum. The Sahel has become the epicentre of global jihadist violence, and the departure of French and American forces has replaced a Western counter-insurgency architecture with a Russian one whose effectiveness is unproven - a mutiny inside the capital, put down only with foreign help, is evidence on that question. The third is the unravelling of ECOWAS. A regional body that loses three contiguous member states loses its free-movement zone, its common external framework and much of its claim to speak for West Africa, and the AES has since moved towards its own passport and joint force. For India the connection is indirect but real: India has development and training links across West Africa, sizeable diaspora and business interests in Nigeria next door, and a stake in a region whose instability feeds migration and energy volatility. Niger is also useful for the mapping questions examiners set on landlocked states and on the Sahel belt.