On July 11, Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune announced that Algeria would return its ambassador to Bamako, a day after reopening its airspace to Malian civilian and military aircraft. Mali’s military government quickly responded by restoring its own ambassador and reopening its skies to Algerian flights, bringing to an end a 14-month diplomatic face-off.
While the return of diplomatic ties closes a difficult chapter between two neighbours whose relationship had deteriorated over the past year, it also opens another: Algeria’s hope of taking on the role of mediator, one it has cultivated in the Sahel for decades and one built on its ability to persuade governments and armed groups to negotiate rather than on military strength. Whether Mali’s military rulers still see value in that approach will determine how far the latest thaw can go.
A relationship already under strain
The dispute that froze relations began in April 2025 when Algerian air defences shot down a Malian-operated drone near Tinzaouaten, a remote town on the Algeria-Mali border. Algeria said the aircraft had crossed into its airspace before it was intercepted. Mali said that was not the case and described the strike as an act of aggression.
After Bamako recalled its ambassador from Algiers, Burkina Faso and Niger also withdrew theirs in solidarity through the Alliance of Sahel States. Algeria responded by recalling its ambassadors from all three countries. By September, the disagreement had reached the United Nations General Assembly, where each side defended different accounts of what had happened over Tinzaouaten.
Yet for many observers, the downing of the drone was only a symptom of a problem that traces back to January 2024, when Mali’s military government withdrew from the 2015 Algiers Peace Accord, arguing that the agreement no longer reflected the country’s priorities.
The accord, negotiated after months of talks in Algiers, sought to end years of conflict in northern Mali through political representation, decentralisation and the gradual disarmament of armed groups. Although implementation faltered almost from the beginning, it remained the main framework guiding international efforts to stabilise northern Mali until Bamako formally abandoned it.
For Mali’s military leaders, the decision is in line with the country’s new foreign policy. Since taking power in 2020, they have sought to place sovereignty at the centre of state policy while reducing the influence of traditional international partners. Agreements negotiated under previous governments increasingly came to be viewed as products of a political order in which outside actors exercised too much influence over Mali’s domestic affairs.
For Algeria, however, the collapse of the agreement was seen as a weakening of a diplomatic framework through which Algiers had exercised much of its influence in the Sahel and called into question a model of mediation it had spent decades promoting.
The disagreements became worse as Malian officials accused Algeria of maintaining close contacts with Tuareg separatists and other influential figures in the country’s north. Bamako argued that those relationships weakened state authority and emboldened groups challenging the government. Algeria rejected the accusation, insisting that dialogue with all parties was not evidence of partiality but the very basis of mediation.
A Malian official told Middle East Eye that Bamako believed Algeria’s contacts with northern actors were intended more to preserve its regional influence than to facilitate an impartial peace process. Malian journalist Ibrahim Touré was even more direct, arguing that Algeria now enjoys “no credibility as a mediator, neither with the government nor with a large segment of Malian public opinion”.
Researchers at the Institute for Security Studies argue that despite the diplomatic row, sustained cooperation between Algeria and Mali remains indispensable because of shared security interests along their long and porous border, especially as the security situation in that corridor has continued to deteriorate. To date, Tuareg separatists and fighters from Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM), an al-Qaeda-linked coalition, still attack military positions across northern Mali, pointing to the resilience of insurgent groups despite years of military campaigns.
The Making of a Mediator
Algeria’s claim to a leading diplomatic role in the Sahel did not begin with President Abdelmadjid Tebboune, nor was it built solely on the 2015 peace accord, but on a foreign policy that has, for decades, treated peace beyond its southern border as inseparable from peace at home.
The two countries share nearly 1,400 kilometres of largely ungoverned desert that has long served as a corridor for arms trafficking, smuggling networks, irregular migration and armed groups. Instability in northern Mali rarely stays confined to Mali. It spills across borders, placing pressure on Algeria’s southern provinces and forcing Algiers to view developments in its neighbour as domestic security concerns.
“Mali’s security and stability are part of Algeria’s own security and stability,” Algerian researcher Toufik Gouider told Middle East Eye.
Although Algeria has sizeable Tuareg communities in its southern provinces, it largely avoided the recurring rebellions that have destabilised northern Mali and parts of Niger. The comparison is not perfect, but successive Algerian governments generally favoured political accommodation alongside security measures, bringing Tuareg leaders into national institutions while investing in infrastructure, public services and economic development across the south. That experience convinced policymakers in Algiers that dialogue and state-building were more sustainable than military force alone.
That belief has shaped Algeria’s engagement with the Sahel since the 1960s. Unlike many external powers that approached Mali primarily through the prism of counterterrorism, Algeria has consistently argued that the country’s recurring crises are as much political as they are military. Ethnic tensions, uneven development, weak state institutions and longstanding grievances in the north, Algerian officials contend, cannot be resolved through force alone.
It also shaped Algeria’s role as a regional mediator. Over three decades, Algiers brokered successive peace agreements between Bamako and northern armed groups, including the 1991 Tamanrasset Accord and the 2006 Algiers Accord. The country’s greatest diplomatic success came after Mali’s 2012 crisis, when Tuareg separatists declared the short-lived state of Azawad before jihadist groups seized control of much of the north.
The negotiations that followed produced the 2015 Agreement for Peace and Reconciliation—better known as the Algiers Accord—which remains the most ambitious attempt to address the political roots of Mali’s conflict.
Successive governments in Bamako accused armed groups of violating their commitments, while rebel movements argued that promised constitutional and political reforms never materialised. Jihadist organisations that were never party to the agreement continued expanding their influence, undermining confidence in the peace process long before Mali’s military government formally abandoned it.
Yet even critics acknowledge that no subsequent initiative has provided a more comprehensive political framework.
Malian journalist Omar al-Ansari described the accord as “the only framework that brought the Malian parties to the same table”, a view shared by many diplomats who regard its collapse not as proof that dialogue failed but as evidence that implementing peace can be harder than negotiating it.
The death of the accord nevertheless dealt a heavy blow to Algeria’s regional standing. It was not simply the failure of one peace agreement but also cast doubt on the diplomatic model that had underpinned Algeria’s influence for decades. The same model that has often distinguished Algeria from other external actors.
France’s interventions through Operations Serval and Barkhane were designed primarily to defeat jihadist organisations and restore state authority. Algeria never opposed military action against extremist groups, but it consistently warned that victories won by the gun are only temporary if they are not accompanied by political dialogue capable of addressing the grievances that fuelled the conflict.
That conviction was reinforced by Algeria’s own “Black Decade” during the 1990s, when a brutal civil war left an estimated 150,000 to 200,000 people dead. The national reconciliation policies that followed remain controversial, but they became the foundation for a culture in which negotiations and political compromise came to be seen as essential components of lasting stability. The same thinking explains Algeria’s longstanding reluctance to project military power beyond its borders.
For decades, the constitution prohibited overseas military deployments, reflecting a foreign policy built around non-interference after Algeria’s war of independence. Although constitutional reforms in 2020 opened the door to limited foreign operations, Tebboune has repeatedly ruled out sending Algerian troops into Mali.
“It is out of the question to send the children of the people to sacrifice themselves for others,” he said after the reforms.
Instead, Algeria has relied on soft power. Its intelligence services have cultivated relationships with political leaders, tribal authorities and armed movements across northern Mali for decades, providing channels of communication unavailable to many outside powers. Border security cooperation has enabled coordination against trafficking and militant groups, while Algeria’s standing within the African Union has reinforced its reputation as a proponent of negotiated conflict resolution.
Economic diplomacy has become another increasingly important tool. As one of Africa’s largest natural gas producers, Algeria sees energy as both an economic asset and a diplomatic instrument. Renewed efforts to advance the long-delayed Trans-Saharan Gas Pipeline, together with Sonatrach’s expanding investments in neighbouring Niger, reflect an attempt to strengthen political relationships through infrastructure and economic integration as much as through traditional diplomacy.
Together, these assets —geography, institutional memory, political relationships and economic leverage— form the foundation of Algeria’s regional influence. Whether they remain sufficient is another matter.
The environment in which Algeria once operated has changed, especially with the military governments that now control the south of its border; new alliances have emerged, and external powers now compete for influence in ways that would have been difficult to imagine when the Algiers Accord was signed a decade ago.
A Region Rewritten
In 2015, France was the dominant external military power in the region. The United Nations maintained one of its largest peacekeeping missions through MINUSMA, while ECOWAS was the principal political forum responding to crises in West Africa. Algeria’s mediation operated within that broader international architecture.
Today, much of that order has collapsed or totally disappeared. France has withdrawn its forces from Mali, MINUSMA ended its mission in 2023 at Bamako’s request, and relations between the military governments of Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger and ECOWAS have fractured. The three countries have since formed the Alliance of Sahel States (AES), a bloc that has evolved from a mutual defence pact into a political alliance built around sovereignty, non-interference and closer security cooperation.
For Algeria, the emergence of the AES has changed the diplomatic equation. Rebuilding ties with Mali can no longer be viewed in isolation; it now requires engaging a bloc whose members increasingly coordinate major foreign policy decisions.
That shift presents both opportunities and constraints for Algeria. The AES’s emphasis on sovereignty and non-interference broadly aligns with principles that have long shaped Algerian foreign policy, giving Algiers a basis for rebuilding ties through border security, infrastructure and broader practical cooperation rather than external pressure. But the bloc also limits Algeria’s room for manoeuvre. Diplomatic disputes with one member now risk affecting relations with all three, as demonstrated when Burkina Faso and Niger joined Mali in recalling their ambassadors during the 2025 crisis.
Algiers appears to have recognised that reality. Since early 2026, it has restored relations with Niger, culminating in a state visit by President Abdourahamane Tiani and agreements on border security, infrastructure and energy cooperation. Burkina Faso has also moved towards normalising relations, while analysts at the Institute for Security Studies note that Mali’s decision to restore diplomatic ties brings the three AES members back into working relations with Algeria. Rather than challenge the alliance, Algiers increasingly appears to see the AES as the regional architecture through which it must engage the central Sahel. Whether that strategy succeeds will depend on its ability to convince the bloc that its tradition of mediation complements, rather than conflicts with, the AES’s emphasis on sovereignty and military-led governance.
That approach is already visible in Algeria’s growing emphasis on economic cooperation. Renewed discussions around the Trans-Saharan Gas Pipeline and Sonatrach’s investments in Niger are a strategy of strengthening political ties through shared commercial interests as much as traditional diplomacy.
But Algeria now operates in a far more competitive environment, with Morocco looking to landlocked Sahelian countries with its Atlantic Initiative, which offers them access to Atlantic ports while advancing the Nigeria-Morocco Gas Pipeline as an alternative regional corridor. Russia, meanwhile, has become Mali’s principal security partner through Africa Corps, reinforcing Bamako’s preference for military partnerships over externally mediated political processes.
Yet Algeria retains advantages few others can match. It shares a long border with Mali, has cultivated relationships across the country’s political and security landscape for decades, and continues to maintain channels of communication with actors that many external powers cannot easily reach. AFP reported earlier this year that Algiers quietly helped facilitate a corridor for Russian personnel to withdraw during fighting around Kidal, illustrating its ability to engage multiple sides even during periods of conflict.
Whether those advantages translate into renewed influence remains uncertain. As analyst Sadek Amin argues, the resurgence of violence in northern Mali pushes a lesson Algeria has long championed: military campaigns alone cannot deliver lasting stability without political dialogue. Officials in Bamako remain sceptical, arguing that previous peace processes often froze conflicts without resolving them.
The return of ambassadors is only a beginning for Algeria; it must now learn how to convince a new generation of military leaders that mediation can reinforce, rather than undermine, sovereignty. Whether it succeeds will shape not only its own regional influence but also whether political dialogue retains a meaningful place in addressing one of Africa’s most enduring security crises.
