ASINT / Geopolitics & Risks
The Gulf of Guinea presents an apparent paradox in 2026: reported piracy is at historically low levels, while geopolitical contestation in the same maritime space has intensified to its highest pitch in recent years. The two trends are not contradictory; they describe two different layers of the same regional reality. Reading them together gives a more accurate picture of what maritime security actually means in the Gulf of Guinea today.
On the piracy front, the data is documented. According to the IMB Annual Piracy and Armed Robbery Report published in January 2026, 21 incidents were reported in the Gulf of Guinea in 2025, compared to 18 in 2024 and 22 in 2023. These are historically low figures. As Commercial Crime Services noted earlier in 2025, the number of reported incidents within the Gulf of Guinea waters and adjoining littoral states continues to be at its lowest in nearly two decades. As the Center for Maritime Strategy observed, the long-term trend in the last fifteen years has, in fact, shown a slight increase, revealing that piracy remains a persistent threat in the area, but the 2023-2025 figures are significantly below the average of nearly 46 attacks annually between 2011 and 2020.
But the same period has seen a structural shift in the type of conflict shaping Gulf of Guinea maritime security. As Al Jazeera Centre for Studies frames it, the period between 2025 and 2026 witnessed what appeared to be a direct challenge to Western hegemony and influence on the region’s security landscape by some of the BRICS Plus members even though the bloc does not operate as a formal security alliance in the Gulf of Guinea. The same analysis documents that Russia reportedly signed military cooperation agreements with Togo in 2025, discussed maritime cooperation with Sao Tome & Principe, and uses Guinea’s port of Conakry as a strategic logistics hub for transporting military equipment to Sahel countries, particularly Mali.
The question this article addresses is what the combination of falling piracy and rising proxy contestation signals for the strategic position of Gulf of Guinea states.
Reading: piracy down, but not for the reasons usually celebrated
The decline in piracy is real but its drivers need to be read carefully. Three factors are usually cited: Nigeria’s Deep Blue Project, the Yaoundé Code of Conduct (2013) coordinating five maritime zones, and an increased international naval presence. According to Al Jazeera Centre for Studies, Nigeria’s Deep Blue project, which includes command and control systems, intelligence platforms, over 100 naval vessels, aerial assets and drones, is said to contribute to this decline by inflicting significant losses and operational costs on pirate groups. Also, the Yaoundé Structure and its Code of Conduct, which divides the Gulf of Guinea into five maritime zones, each served by a regional coordination centre, provide the infrastructure for information sharing among nations and a coordinated response to piracy.
But the picture is more nuanced. The IMB explicitly warns against reading the figures as a fully resolved security problem. According to IMB Director Michael Howlett, “We also commend the Gulf of Guinea authorities for the steps taken to reduce reported incidents, while recognising that crew members continue to be affected”. The 2025 data shows that the region accounted for the kidnapping of 23 crew in four separate incidents, along with three hostages and one injured crew member. The violence per incident has not declined at the same pace as the incident count. Crew safety remains the operational concern even as the headline number of incidents falls.
The Atlantic Council provides a more structural reading of why the decline may not be sustainable. Following a peak in the mid-2010s, pirate activity in the Gulf of Guinea has declined over the last several years. This decrease in overall incidents is often attributed to a combination of efforts from regional and international actors, including the Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency (NIMASA), the Nigerian Navy, and Group of Seven Friends of the Gulf of Guinea (G7 ++ FoGG) navies. However, the underlying socioeconomic factors that spurred it haven’t gone away. A confluence of factors make piracy and armed robbery at sea a perpetual threat to the Gulf of Guinea region. Among them are competing security priorities that divert attention and resources away from maritime threats, leaving vast coastal areas vulnerable. Extreme poverty drives many coastal communities to view piracy as a viable economic alternative in the absence of sustainable livelihoods. Corruption and limited enforcement capacity weaken the rule of law, allowing pirate groups to operate with relative impunity.
The piracy decline is therefore an operational result obtained at high cost, not a structural resolution of underlying drivers. Maintaining the figures at current levels requires continued investment in naval presence, international cooperation, and regional coordination. Any reduction in any of these factors could shift the trend back upward. The decline is conditional, not stabilised.
The proxy layer: what is actually emerging
The second layer is the geopolitical contestation. The shift from piracy to proxy conflicts is described by Al Jazeera Centre for Studies through several documented developments. The first is the establishment of Conakry port as a Russian logistics hub for the Sahel, which we have documented separately based on The Sentry’s “Doubling Down” report of April 2026. The second is the Chinese naval engagement: in addition to the reports of China trying to establish a strategic Chinese naval base in Equatorial Guinea, China’s 48th Maritime Task Force between 2024 and 2025 made at least 15 visits to African ports, signalling a move from random anti-piracy operations to a more organised, sovereignty-focused security posture that appeals to countries in the region seeking “strategic independence”.
The third is the convergence of inland insurgent threats with coastal maritime security. The southward expansion of “terrorist” operations from the Sahel region is creating a “coastal-inland” threat, as “terrorists” seek to bridge the gap between the Sahel and maritime routes. By the last quarter of 2025, groups like Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM) had increased their incursions into northern Benin, Togo and Ghana, raising serious maritime security concerns. In addition, both Boko Haram and the Islamic State (IS) are moving from Nigeria’s north to its south. The southward migration of “terrorists” appears to be a regional expansion and a deliberate effort to secure “maritime corridors” for illicit revenues, linking inland smuggling routes for fuel, drugs and gold to global trade flows managed through major coastal ports.
The fourth is state-level maritime disputes. As Al Jazeera Centre for Studies notes, Ghana, in February 2026, formally initiated legal proceedings against Togo at the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea. This illustrates the tension and escalation at the state level in the region’s conflicts over oil-rich areas and strategic maritime boundaries. Maritime border disputes are reactivating in a context where offshore oil and gas resources have gained strategic value.
In parallel, the European and American presence in the region has been consolidated rather than reduced. In February 2022, the European Council reinforced its leading role by extending the coordinated maritime presence (CMP) in the Gulf of Guinea for two more years and continuing its maritime security efforts, including the Enhanced Maritime Action in the Gulf of Guinea (EnMAR) from 2022 to 2026, presenting the European Union as a “permanent provider of maritime security” in the region. Furthermore, the 2025 Obangame Express exercises signals Washington’s tactical move towards combatting illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing and arms trafficking. The Center for Maritime Strategy documents that in May 2025, the U.S. Navy led the 14th Obangame Express in the Gulf of Guinea. With thirty countries in attendance, including twenty-two African nations, it was the largest multinational maritime security exercise held in the region.
The Gulf of Guinea is therefore now hosting at least three overlapping security architectures: the established Western-led framework (G7 ++ FoGG navies, EU CMP, US Obangame Express), the emerging Russian and Chinese presence (Conakry logistics hub, naval visits, military agreements with Togo), and the inland-coastal terrorist expansion. The reduction in piracy does not occur because security is resolved; it occurs because the security space is now occupied by a denser configuration of state and non-state actors than at any time in the recent past.
Implications: what this means for Gulf of Guinea states
Three implications follow from the dual reading.
The first concerns the strategic position of coastal states. Gulf of Guinea governments are now confronted with a more complex security environment than the piracy threat alone implied. Each state must arbitrate between multiple partners offering different security packages: Western navies (with their conditionality on governance and human rights), Russian military cooperation (with its alignment requirements), Chinese engagement (with its preference for sovereignty-focused framing), and inland counter-terrorism cooperation. The arbitrage is not symmetric: each partnership comes with explicit and implicit constraints. As Al Jazeera Centre for Studies notes, the BRICS Plus members are not operating as a formal security alliance, but the cumulative effect of their individual engagements creates an alternative pole that coastal states can leverage in negotiations with traditional Western partners. The strategic value of the Gulf of Guinea for each coastal state has increased, but so has the complexity of managing it.
The second implication concerns the economic dimension. The Gulf of Guinea hosts approximately 5 million barrels per day of oil production from Nigeria, Angola, Gabon, Congo, and Equatorial Guinea, as we have documented in our previous analysis on Hormuz disruption and the Gulf of Guinea opening. The maritime corridor for Atlantic-bound crude exports is also the corridor now contested by the layered security configurations described above. A piracy incident affects shipping insurance and crew safety. A proxy contestation affects the political environment in which long-term off-take contracts are negotiated. Coastal states with significant oil exports have a direct interest in maintaining the piracy reduction (which preserves shipping fluidity) while managing the proxy layer to avoid disrupting commercial relationships with major importers (China and India in particular).
The third implication concerns the southward migration of inland insurgent threats. The JNIM, Boko Haram, and Islamic State movements identified by Al Jazeera Centre for Studies as moving towards coastal areas represent a different category of risk from piracy. Piracy is a maritime crime conducted by groups with predominantly local recruitment and economic motives. The expansion of jihadist movements into coastal Benin, Togo, Ghana, and southern Nigeria creates a security architecture in which maritime and inland threats converge. The Yaoundé Code of Conduct was designed for piracy; it does not address inland-coastal terrorist coordination at the level required. Coastal states are therefore confronting a security gap that the existing piracy-focused framework cannot fill alone.
Outlook: three indicators to monitor
The Gulf of Guinea trajectory in 2026 and 2027 will be measured by three indicators.
The first is whether the piracy figures consolidate or rebound. The 21 incidents recorded in 2025 represent a historically low level, but the trend can reverse quickly if naval presence is reduced, if economic drivers worsen, or if insurgent groups absorb existing piracy networks. The Q1 2026 IMB report will be the first signal of whether the 2023-2025 plateau is being maintained. Any significant uptick would indicate that the underlying drivers are reasserting themselves.
The second is the institutional response to the documented proxy presence. As we noted in our analysis of The Sentry’s Conakry report, the question of whether Western jurisdictions sanction UC Rusal subsidiaries, and whether ECOWAS investigates the Conakry port role, will determine whether the Russian-Sahel logistics corridor consolidates or faces operational friction. The same question extends to the Chinese naval engagement and the bilateral military agreements signed with Togo and Sao Tome. Coastal states’ freedom of action in 2026-2027 depends in large part on how external actors respond to these arrangements.
The third is the actual integration of inland and maritime threats. The convergence of JNIM and Boko Haram movements with coastal economies is at an early stage. The pace at which it consolidates will determine whether the Gulf of Guinea becomes a single contiguous security space (with maritime and inland threats merging) or whether the existing institutional structures (Yaoundé Code, NIMASA, regional coordination centres) can adapt to address the convergence before it becomes structural. The next twelve to eighteen months will be the formative period.
The reduction in piracy and the rise in proxy contestation are two dimensions of the same trajectory. The Gulf of Guinea is becoming more strategically valuable, more contested, and more institutionally complex at the same time. The headline figures on piracy capture only one dimension of this evolution. The broader picture, which combines the documented decline in maritime crime with the documented intensification of proxy engagement, gives a more accurate reading of what coastal states are actually navigating in 2026.