Burkina Faso's risk signature mirrors Mali 2010-2012 and CAR 2011-2013
Five risk domains light up together in our current bake. The same combination preceded the 2012 Mali coup and the 2013 Central African Republic collapse. The pattern is structural, the outcomes are historical — and the gap between resemblance and prediction is where this piece spends most of its time.
What QGI sees on Burkina Faso right now
QGI's 2026-04-30 bake places Burkina Faso in the MODERATE tier overall. The aggregate score is unremarkable for the Sahel — moderate scores on individual risk dimensions are common in a band where structural fragility is the regional baseline. What is unusual, and what this piece is about, is which five domains are firing at once.
| Risk category | Max-salience | Tier |
|---|---|---|
| Civil War & Insurgency | 2.22σ | MODERATE |
| Military Coup | 1.85σ | MODERATE |
| Mass Protest | 1.24σ | MODERATE |
| Political Repression | 1.22σ | MODERATE |
| Elections & Voting | 1.16σ | MODERATE |
Civil-war salience above 2σ, military-coup salience above 1.8σ, three further categories elevated together — this is a five- domain firing, not a single dominant signal. The aggregate tier is MODERATE because none of these scores individually crosses the 2.5σ HIGH cutoff. Looking only at the headline number, you would not notice. Looking at the five rows together, you see something that resembles two specific historical episodes from QGI's corpus.
Mali, 2010-2012
From late 2010 through early 2012, Mali's indicator trajectory carried the same five-row firing: civil conflict, coup, protest, repression, and electoral salience all elevated simultaneously. Mali's headline tier through that period was, like Burkina Faso's today, not HIGH. It was the combination that was distinctive.
In March 2012, junior officers led by Captain Amadou Sanogo seized power in Bamako, four weeks before scheduled presidential elections. The Tuareg-led MNLA, taking advantage of the post-coup vacuum, declared the independent state of Azawad in the north on 6 April 2012. By January 2013, French Operation Serval was underway. Around 1.2 million Malians were displaced over the eighteen months that followed. The five- domain signature preceded the coup by roughly fifteen months.
Central African Republic, 2011-2013
CAR carried the same five-row firing — civil conflict, coup potential, protest, repression, elections — through 2011 and 2012. The aggregate tier was not HIGH. The combination was unusual.
On 24 March 2013, the Séléka coalition captured Bangui; President François Bozizé fled. The humanitarian crisis that followed displaced roughly half the country's population at peak and brought a French and African Union intervention. The five-domain signature preceded the takeover by roughly eighteen months.
Two of two
QGI's corpus carries the five-domain firing pattern in two country-year windows that are historically resolvable: Mali 2010-2012 and CAR 2011-2013. Both produced humanitarian crises within twelve-to-eighteen months of the equivalent signature appearing. That is a two-of-two outcome.
Two cases are not a probability. They are a structural resemblance with a historical record. Burkina Faso's current pattern is recognizable from those two cases. The outcomes are not.
Why we are publishing this
QGI's purpose is to surface historical precedents that an analyst can use as a starting point — not to issue forecasts. Burkina Faso's current five-domain firing is the kind of structural pattern our pipeline is designed to find. Mali and CAR are the kind of historical analogues that earn that structural pattern its weight.
A risk analyst reading this should not change a contingency plan on the strength of one blog post. They should look at the five rows above, check our methodology, look at the historical cases on their own terms, and decide whether the resemblance warrants closer attention. We think it does. The point of publishing is to make the case visible, not to settle it.
For the reader who wants more
- Burkina Faso signal page — current bake's salience values per category, refreshed monthly.
- Civil-war-and-insurgency precedent — the ML-validated recipe behind the 2.22σ score on that row.
- Methodology — how the bake is computed, what salience means, where the cohort comes from.
Published 2026-05-16 · QG Intelligence · Salience values cited from the 2026-04-30V1.9.1 bake. Pattern matching against QGI's historical corpus is described on the methodology page; this piece reports a single observation and its two historical analogues. It is not a forecast.