Description
How does Saudi Arabia’s footprint in West Africa reflect and reshape patterns of power, partnership, and uncertainty in the Global South? Focusing on development, security, and geostrategic cooperation under its Vision 2030, the paper explores how the Kingdom’s engagements with Ghana and Senegal, supplemented by comparative insights from Nigeria, illuminate the opportunities and tensions of South–South diplomacy in a multipolar age. Drawing on field interviews, policy analysis, and project-level evidence, it traces how Saudi initiatives in infrastructure, finance, and stabilization efforts interact with local priorities and competing external actors. The paper uses the framework of dialogic soft power to examine how attraction and legitimacy are co-produced rather than imposed. It proposes that Saudi–West African relations offer a microcosm of the Global South’s adaptive strategies in the face of global uncertainty. It contributes to ongoing debates on middle-power agency, developmental geopolitics, and the ethics of cooperation beyond traditional donor–recipient hierarchies.
