Security threats, conflicts and rivalries in the northern and sahelian Africa contributed to and are affected by symbiotic centrifugal and centripetal forces that lead to both increasing fragmentation and periodic corralling towards unified action. In March 2017, Jihadi groups affiliated with Al Qaeda merged, creating what was supposed to become a new powerful organization: The Group to Support Islam and Muslims (GSIM). The goal was to fulfill the wishes of Al Qaeda leadership with the clear intention of stepping up attacks in the region, following the creation of a French -led regional organization, known as the G 5 Sahel. The creation of GSIM occurred in the context of the weakening of the Islamic State in the Middle East and North Africa; the serious Iraqi and Syrian degradations directly affected IS (Daesch) affiliates in the Sahel, namely the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara (ISGS), the main competitor of GSIM. Since late 2017, and with the total collapse of IS, there have been recurring rumors of the establishment of a new alliance between the GSIM and the ISGS, coupled with a major upsurge in jihadi activities in the whole Sahelian region, but personal and doctrinal differences, harsh propaganda towards each other, and other forces keep these group at loggerheads. Despite these regroupings and continuing threats, regional powers rarely follow coherent, cohesive, or unified strategies to confront them; instead, we see a multiplication of divergent strategies reflecting conflicts of interests and between the long-terms policy goals of each regional and international actors. The French-led G5 Sahel is opposed by the leading regional power, Algeria, often characterized as “a reluctant power” despite the threat coming from within its eastern and southern frontiers. Likewise, Morocco and Algeria often fail to cooperate even when their interests align. The American-led Trans-Saharan Counterterrorism Partnership has operated independently of other security groupings since 2002 with little coordination. Using the framework of the dilemmas of collective action (Sandler, Olson, Frohlish, Oye, and Elster, among others), this paper offers an in-depth analysis of the difficulties in putting in place either a unified jihadi front or a collective security architecture of response. This paper rests seven years of extensive fieldwork, including hundreds of interviews conducted since 2011 in nearly every Maghreb and Sahel nation and including both regional security officials and former jihadists.