Fakiha Noor
A chessboard never reveals its winner in the opening move. At first glance, spectators believe the objective is simple: just to capture the king, but every grandmaster knows that victory is decided long before the king is cornered. It is achieved by controlling space, sacrificing pawns, manipulating diagonals, blocking movement, and forcing the opponent into positions from which escape becomes impossible.
Today, the new geography of conflict has unfolded like an international chessboard where the king is no longer needed because, in early ages, wars were fought to seize territory and defeat armies. Borders were the squares of the chessboard, tanks were the rooks, and soldiers were the pawns marching in disciplined formations. Nowadays, this board has expanded beyond physical borders into cyberspace, economies, societies, and human psychology. Kings existed in the form of sovereign states, but remarkably, they are no longer the primary target. Instead, every surrounding piece is attacked until the king becomes strategically irrelevant.
In this chessboard, the pawn represents geopolitics and strategy, the insignificant move that quietly determines the outcome of the game. Pawns are expendable today; they occupy space, block movement, and gradually reshape the battlefield. They move their proxy militias, private military companies, cyber operations, economic sanctions, and diplomatic pressure to transform terrorism into structural metamorphosis. The Sahel demonstrates this pawn strategy through the withdrawal of French forces and ECOWAS and the new alliance with the Wagner group, which generates contagious political instability in the region under resource exploitation by militias (IS, JNIM) and influences Sudan, the DRC, Lake Basin, and Chad with the same atrocities. This makes F. Curri’s Iron Law, “Conflict is the oxygen of terrorism”, an important driving force.
The knight symbolises ideology, the most unpredictable piece in the game. Unlike every other chess piece, the knight never attacks in a straight line but leaps unexpectedly over obstacles, appearing where opponents least anticipate. Ideology is functioning similarly and bypasses military borders and penetrates identities, beliefs, religion, ethnicity, and historical memory. Here, Francis Stewart argues that horizontal inequalities lead to violent conflict with economic disparities and ignite violence which has emerged through inequality, followed by ethnic or religious lines. So, ideological narratives become the knight’s unexpected fork, simultaneously attacking politics, society, and economics.
The bishop represents economic coercion, moving silently along long diagonals and rarely attacking directly because economies determine political outcomes without firing a single bullet, where weak states become vulnerable squares and external actors compete for influence. At the same time, local militias prolong instability for economic gain. On the other hand, the rook symbolises security, the strongest defensive structure on the chessboard, which protects the king. Still, the irony of today’s conflict is unmistakable: governments continue strengthening their rooks, but their opponents infiltrate cyberspace, manipulate public opinion, radicalise youth, and weaken institutions from within. The castle remains intact while the foundations quietly collapse.
Finally, the queen, representing environmental stressors, is the most powerful force because it combines every direction of movement, like climate change, drought, food insecurity, resource scarcity, displacement, and malnutrition, to intersect with geopolitical rivalry, ideological polarisation, economic inequality, and fragile governance. This makes the queen transform local crises into regional instability, magnifying every weakness already present on the board. This evolution operated by the four steps of the new chessboard of conflict.
Opening resembles the fragmentation and integration of a chess match. Every player seeks control over separate squares according to national interests, like Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso, confronting fragmented insurgencies while simultaneously forming new regional security alignments, including the Alliance of Sahel States.
The middle game constitutes over interiorisation and exteriorisation, where domestic unrest appears internal but is carefully engineered or exploited by external players. For instance, Cameroon, Benin and Togo exemplify this strategy as regional militant networks spill across borders, manipulating local ethnic tensions for strategic gain linked to Jama’at Nasr al-Islam wal-Muslimin and Islamic State Sahel Province.
Endgame reflects the duration when modern conflicts become prolonged because the human insecurity itself becomes a battlefield, like the Sahel recording over 11,000 conflict-related fatalities in 2025, making it the world’s deadliest terrorism hotspot, while millions remain displaced and put the civilianization into chaos.
Resultantly, the checkmate that nobody notices represents civilianisation, which does not see civilians as collateral damage but as principal targets through digital radicalisation, encrypted platforms, echo chambers, and online propaganda. Here, ordinary citizens become weapons against their own societies.
In conclusion, modern conflict is not fought to capture territory; it is fought to control the entire chessboard. The most dangerous move is rarely the obvious attack but the quiet pawn that reaches the eighth rank unnoticed. Governments that continue preparing only for conventional warfare resemble amateur players obsessed with protecting their king while ignoring the gradual capture of every surrounding square. In the new geography of conflict, victory belongs not to the strongest army but to the player who understands that wars are now won through strategy before they are ever fought on the battlefield.
