The Sahel region regularly sees structural crises that institutions and officialdom can hardly manage. The spread of the Arab Spring revolutions from north African countries toward southern ones accelerated and intensified the continent's integration into global processes, to the point that the entire region's stability was threatened. A new era has dawned where local grievances find international expression, propelled by Sahelian states' inability to find new ways to govern and satisfy their populations' expectations, boosted by a commodities rush, religious radicalization, and especially the "importation" of external tensions.