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Signe Marie Cold-Ravnkilde, Katja Lindskov Jacobsen, Disentangling the security traffic jam in the Sahel: constitutive effects of contemporary interventionism, International Affairs, Volume 96, Issue 4, July 2020, Pages 855–874, https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiaa093
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Abstract
Despite years of ongoing interventions by multiple external and regional actors, the security situation in west Africa's Sahel region is dramatically deteriorating. In this introduction to the special section of the July 2020 issue of International Affairs, we zoom in on four major external international intervention actors (France, the United States, the European Union and the United Nations) in the Sahel region's escalating ‘security traffic jam’. We argue that the diversity of intervention actors makes the Sahel a paradigmatic case for exploring a set of often-overlooked constitutive intervention effects. By adding new temporal, relational and spatial dimensions to the notion of ‘constitutive effects’ as introduced by post-structuralists in the 1990s, we (re)launch constitutive effects as a conceptual framework for approaching the study of ongoing intervention engagements. From this perspective, and as further illustrated in this special section, intervention continuity and escalation cannot be explained simply with reference to frameworks of ‘success’ or ‘failure’, but require a broader conceptualization of effects, including how specific threat perceptions, rationales and problematizations get constituted and consolidated through and during ongoing intervention practice. Contributions to this special section each unpack a diverse set of constitutive effects including the contested performance of security actorness, the (un)making of security alliances and partnerships, logics of choices produced by ongoing intervention practices, as well as the constitution of conditions for continual international involvement.
The deaths of 13 French special forces soldiers during a counterterrorist operation in the cross-border region of Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso on the night of 25 November 2019 plunged France into mourning.1 Then, on 10 December 2019, Islamic State in Greater Sahara (ISGS) claimed responsibility for an attack that killed 71 Nigerien soldiers, adding to the more than 100 Malian soldiers killed since October 2019 and to the 35 civilians and seven soldiers killed in another attack that December in northern Burkina Faso. Meanwhile, intense public protests in Mali have become increasingly difficult for international security actors to dismiss. In April 2019, tens of thousands of people rallied in the streets of Bamako to protest at the lack of government response to the escalating violence, following the killing of more than 150 Fulani villagers, the deadliest act of bloodshed in the country's history. The protesters also called for external security forces to leave the country, perceiving them to be protecting their own interests rather than the security of the Malian people.2 As EU member states plan to deploy special forces under the ‘Takuba’ initiative (which some see as an embryonic European army) to support the French counterterrorist operation initiated in 2013, violence continues to escalate, not only in Mali but across the entire Sahel region.3
The labelling of spaces as coherent regions like ‘the Sahel’ is certainly neither ahistorical nor apolitical.4 Following successive eras of colonial relationships, post-colonial ties and development cooperation, the region referred to as ‘the Sahel’ is now described as having entered an era of securitization.5 While acknowledging the significance of these legacies, this special section primarily addresses the effects of western-led external military interventions in the current era of securitization in the socially constructed and politically contested space known as ‘the Sahel’.
Notwithstanding the historical trajectories of regional conflict and international efforts to address these dynamics, the current spate of intervention was triggered by the collapse of security in Mali in 2012, when an unstable coalition of nationalist Tuareg rebels and local and transnational jihadist groups declared an independent state, Azawad, in northern Mali. In the following months, jihadist groups imposed themselves on the north and expanded southwards into central Mali. Although a French-led military intervention, Operation Serval, pushed the jihadist expansion back, northern Mali remains one of the most dangerous places for UN peacekeepers, and in recent years there has been a steady growth in both jihadist activity and inter- and intracommunal violence across the region.
In response to these developments, not only Mali but most states in the Sahel have now become sites for numerous external interventions. The aim of this special section is to focus on the principal actors in this so-called ‘security traffic jam’,6 to explore not only the pursuit of their diverse political agendas, sometimes disconnected from the interests of host states (and societies), but also the diverse range of effects to which their intervention practices give rise. By zooming in on the four main external intervention actors—France, the United States, the EU and the UN (through the Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali, MINUSMA)—the contributions to this special section each explore distinct effects of the different engagements that make up these continuing international interventions. As well as being the largest players, these four intervention actors also represent an illustrative mix of ‘traditional’ liberal intervention actor profiles—state-led (US, France), and global (UN) and regional (EU) multilateral institutions. The role of regional and continental actors has been explored by others elsewhere; this tremendously important perspective lies beyond the scope of this special section.7
In the Sahelian security ‘traffic jam’, international actors often emphasize synergies between what are commonly framed as multidimensional and comprehensive approaches, aimed sometimes at rebuilding ‘failed’ states and sometimes at stabilizing the entire region—or, rather, the emerging interstate spaces that attract particular attention, notably the G5 Sahel states of Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger. Indeed, to some extent, the intervention efforts of the EU, the UN, France and the United States are based on shared ideas about liberal interventionism in which attempts are made to establish a particular kind of political authority and monopoly on violence through formal bureaucratic institutions and security forces, to enforce the will of state institutions across the state's territory. As such, implicit in liberal interventionism are assumptions about the possibility of restoring ‘state sovereignty’ through external actors’ military and other engagements,8 a topic to which we will return shortly. However, we argue that, despite these shared assumptions, the coexistence of several diverse intervening actors is characterized by various levels of ‘disconnect’, including disconnects between actors’ discourses and practices, disconnects between their ambitions and their ability to deploy, and disconnects between different objectives for deployments (counterterrorism, migration, stabilization, etc.). Indeed, the Sahelian ‘security traffic jam’ is not merely a matter of a crowded arena and a lack of coordination, but also, crucially, one of different and potentially competing mandates, rationales, priorities and directions, with some intervention actors drafting in additional task forces (for example, under the Takuba initiative), while others (notably the United States) contemplate downscaling.9 Challenging ideas about synergy and coherence—as commonly emphasized in interventions framed as multidimensional and comprehensive—contributions to this special section highlight the variation in rules of engagement across actors in the Sahelian ‘security traffic jam’,10 and the potentially conflicting directions and intervention approaches in play, e.g. between long-term engagements and direct counterterrorist operations. There are even competing spatial definitions of where the ‘Sahel’ begins and ends,11 and no agreement on whether specific engagements amount to ‘interventions’ (France) or to ‘mere’ security cooperation (United States). These differences and disagreements reinforce the point that the Sahel is a complex intervention space in which a myriad diverse and largely unsynchronized intervention actors sometimes overlap and cooperate, but just as often operate in parallel—possibly even contradicting one another and creating disconnects. Furthermore, we argue, the coexistence of diverse justifications and rationales is indicative of broader challenges confronting contemporary liberal interventionism.12
Because the Sahel hosts an extraordinary diversity of intervention actors and approaches, it offers a favourable context for exploring different manifestations of contemporary interventionism and the various effects proceeding from these engagements. As this is clearly not a topic exclusive to the Sahel, our focus on the ‘constitutive effects’ (see below) of various intervention endeavours could also inspire analyses of ongoing intervention practices elsewhere. More specifically, we engage with an important post-structuralist legacy in broader International Relations (IR) scholarship by reintroducing the concept of ‘constitutive effects’ as a framework within which to unpack a range of consequences of contemporary intervention practices, in our case with reference to interventions in the Sahel. We argue that the notion of constitutive effects helpfully attunes analyses of intervention engagements to questions of how specific logics and rationales, self-understandings, hierarchies, partnerships and even intervention spaces are constituted through intervention practices and their component parts.13
By calling attention to such constitutive effects, we add to existing debates about the importance of shifting focus and framings away from binary divisions between intended and unintended consequences and between the success and failure of interventions.14 As Charbonneau and Sears argue, such debates tend to rely on a ‘myth of peace as teleology’, that is, an assumption that a peaceful end-point can be reached if the right conditions are constructed or the right policies implemented.15 Taking seriously the point about the radical impossibility of peace, we argue that the framework of constitutive effects adds to our appreciation of why ‘situations of permanent military intervention’ emerge and prevail despite, or sometimes even because of, ‘failing’ intervention practices.16 As Guichaoua points out below, interventions often follow a self-sustaining ‘maximalist logic, according to which failure leads not to the withdrawal of an initiative but to the design of a new one’.17 From this perspective, and as further illustrated in this special section, the continuity and escalation of intervention cannot be explained simply with reference to frameworks of ‘success’ or ‘failure’, but require a broader conceptualization of effects, including how specific threat perceptions, rationales and problematizations get constituted and consolidated through and during the practice of intervention.
Responding to earlier appeals for broader understandings of ‘intervention’,18 contributions to this special section look at topics such as how the everyday practices of security actors create dichotomous zones of safety and danger, and how the conditions for and logics of continued international involvement are constituted. In other words, this introduction begins from a broad appreciation of what we should include and attend to in analyses of intervention.19 Understanding intervention broadly not only enables the accommodation of a diverse range of external actors’ engagements in the Sahel; it also enables an appreciation of the multiple ‘component parts’ of contemporary international interventions, including not only institutions and material conditions but a broader array of ‘knowledges, practices, objects, and people’.20 As the various contributions to this special section illustrate, this broad conceptualization of intervention enables us to see, for example, how such component parts of intervention engagements ‘come to generate their own rationalities of rule and their own fields of operation’, which are in turn ‘embedded in a labour of problematization for which they claim remedy’.21 Indeed, when referring to interventionism we seek to indicate such broader rationalities, logics or approaches, relevant beyond, and characteristic of more than, any single intervention effort. Moreover, we suggest, appreciating different types of effects simultaneously invites important questions such as how different ‘effects’ relate to one another, and how different ‘desired’ effects are prioritized. We further propose that more explicit attention be paid to effects stemming from relations between different intervention actors, for example in relation to ‘forum shopping’ and the role of local agency.
This introductory article proceeds by accounting for how we engage with the notion of constitutive effects, building upon and advancing the existing literature on interventions in and beyond the Sahel. Having briefly introduced the main intervention actors in the Sahelian security traffic jam, the article then unpacks the questions of what gets constituted and how in the Sahelian intervention space. Specifically, by drawing on examples from contributions to this special section as well as from the existing Sahel literature, we organize the analysis of constitutive effects along three dimensions: spatiality, temporality and relationality. Furthermore, by calling attention to the constitutive capacity of selected ‘component parts’ of these interventions, we proceed to unpack how constitutive effects are produced in the Sahel, as well as how diverse constitutive effects are related in this context. Finally, the conclusion discusses the advantages gained from redirecting the analytical gaze towards constitutive effects when exploring ongoing intervention efforts in the escalating and expanding Sahelian intervention space. The conclusion also points to ways in which this framework may inspire debates about the manifold effects of contemporary interventionism, not only in the Sahel but also beyond.
Revisiting the constitutive effects of international interventionism in and beyond the Sahel
Important effects of international interventionism in the Sahel have already been explored. First, scholars have debated how the 2012 Malian crisis and subsequent interventions altered and transformed governance and socio-political order in the region.22 Illustrating how Operation Serval and its successor, Operation Barkhane, transformed Sahelian politics, Charbonneau and Sears have shown how the blurred binaries of war and peace, as well as the ambiguous and inappropriate labelling of ‘compliant and non-compliant groups’ (the latter classified as terrorists) in UN peacekeeping and international counterterrorist operations, have hampered possibilities for creating peace and resolving conflict.23 Broader challenges to the very idea that external interventions can ‘build peace through war’ have also been raised.24 In a similar vein, Karlsrud argues that while different stakeholders have different interpretations of what the term ‘stabilization’ means, the combined effects of ad hoc coalitions with a strong orientation towards counter-insurgency and counterterrorism risks undermining the legitimacy of the UN.25 Furthermore, addressing the politics of international labelling with respect to Niger, Frowd has shown how labelling the country as a ‘transit state’ shapes governing practices of the ‘intervened’ state in response to constructed security threats.26 Another strand of literature emphasizes how dissonant relationships between host states and international partners may undermine the effectiveness of interventions.27 Others again argue that the Sahel region has become a ‘laboratory of experimentation’ in which different security actors have attempted to consolidate and legitimate their agency.28 Building upon and adding to the existing literature on interventionism in and beyond the Sahel,29 we propose a broader conceptual appreciation of the multiple effects that emerge as intervention practices (continue to) unfold.
As used in IR, the notion of constitutive effects dates back to the 1990s, when post-structuralists called attention to intervention discourses as constitutive of presumably fixed categories, notably that of state sovereignty. In this article, we read this critical post-structuralist legacy and the notion of constitutive effects as inviting two crucial questions: What gets constituted? What is constitutive?
What gets constituted?
For post-structuralists, deconstructing the idea that interventions first transgress and then reconstruct state sovereignty exposed the central concept of sovereignty as constituted (rather than fixed or given), while also stressing the constituted nature of intervention communities.30 As such, post-structuralists approach sovereignty not as a previously fixed quality, but as a category to which meaning is ascribed through intervention (and non-intervention) discourses, specific to a given time and space.31 By demonstrating the fluidity and alterable nature of the notion of sovereignty, it becomes possible to address a theoretical blind spot and apply an important critical note: with every meaning attributed to the notion of sovereignty comes a specific answer to the question of whose security the state must prioritize. Hence the significance of unpacking the constituted nature of the notion of sovereignty and critically enquiring into the consequences of specific articulations of the concept—as opposed to taking a certain notion (and its consequences) for granted. From this perspective, post-structuralists also broadened the focus of enquiry to look not only at the ‘sovereignty’ (or lack of it) of the intervened-upon state, but also at how interventions constitute the sovereignty/identity of the intervening state—see, for example, Campbell's analysis of ‘how foreign policy constitutes the US’.32
More recently, analysing intervention practices in Jordan, Schuetze uses a similar analytical framework to demonstrate how ‘interveners’ desired self-understandings’ get constituted through intervention practices that maintain ‘assumptions of cultural “difference”’.33 Beyond IR, the idea of constitutive effects has also been used in ethnographic studies of development interventions to explain how constitutive effects of development projects reflect back upon intervention actors. According to Mosse, interventions may tell us more about the interveners’ desired representations than about the environment that is intervened upon. He further notes that intervention actors ‘work hardest of all to maintain coherent representations of themselves regardless of events’.34 As Weber, Mosse and Schuetze have all highlighted, neither the temporary meaning of sovereignty, nor desired self-understandings or desired representations, exist in a vacuum: they are relational. As constitutive effects they implicate domestic and international audiences,35 and also ‘the intervened upon’ and the ‘interveners’.36 We will return to this relational dimension shortly. First, these reflections about what gets constituted raise another question: how does the meaning of sovereignty, or desired self-understandings or representations, get constituted? This leads us to the second question invited by this post-structuralist legacy.
What is constitutive?
In the early post-structuralist tradition, the primary focus is on discourse as a constitutive practice. Through analyses of intervention discourses—in relation to, for example, Bosnia,37 Algeria,38 Iraq39—it has been demonstrated that prior justifications advanced to legitimize interventions40 have constitutive effects in so far as they contribute to defining which performative criteria a state must exhibit in order to be intersubjectively recognized as a sovereign state (where intervention is not legitimate).41 Put differently, justifications for and legitimations of intervention, along with broader discourses, are constitutive of a specific meaning of sovereignty in that such justifications imply what sovereignty is not. Weber has shown how ‘intervention practices participate in stabilizing the meaning of sovereignty … because discussions of intervention invariably imply questions of sovereignty’—questions that an ‘intervention discourse’ temporarily settles.42 Thus intervention discourses, in how they legitimize and justify interventions, are constitutive.
In short, we take these two fundamental questions—‘what gets constituted’ and ‘what is constitutive’—from the existing literature and re-engage with them by asking the following: what gets constituted—if not mainly a specific notion of sovereignty? And what is constitutive—if not only (or mainly) a priori justifications and legitimizing intervention discourses? Thus, in our case, the two questions are posed slightly differently. One reason for this is that in today's intervention landscape, certainly in the Sahel, the links between intervention and sovereignty are different from those addressed by post-structuralists in the 1990s/2000s. As Chandler writes, while earlier IR approaches ‘were undoubtedly insightful in understanding sovereignty and intervention as mutually constitutive concepts’, it is important to note that we have since seen a significant ‘severing of the ties between sovereignty and intervention’.43 In the case of Mali, for example, interventions are increasingly undertaken ‘by invitation’ from the host state, and sometimes not seen as contradicting ‘host’ state sovereignty.44 Hence the argument that ‘host states’ have become skilled at ‘taming’ intervention.45 Such intervention scenarios entail a different link or boundary from that described by post-structuralists in cases where interventions have occurred against the will of the (no longer sovereign) state. Yet this difference does not mean that ‘constitutive effects’ disappear. Acknowledging how important contributions to the literature on interventionism in the Sahel address this issue,46 this special section looks at how such a severing of ties has unfolded in the Sahel.
At this point, before we turn to address the two abovementioned questions with a focus on current international interventions in the Sahel, we first briefly introduce in more detail the different intervention actors in this Sahelian ‘security traffic jam’.
Who are the actors? The intervention traffic jam in the Sahel
Prompted in particular by the jihadist occupation of northern Mali, the deployment of France's ‘expeditionary military operation’, Operation Serval, on 10 January 2013, at the request of Mali's interim government, has been defined as ‘the watershed moment that focused international attention on the terrorist threat’ in the region.47 Yet the recent French and American framing of the Sahel as a new frontier in the global ‘war on terror’ predated the deployment of Serval. To secure the Sahel's vast and so-called ‘ungoverned territories’, perceived as a ‘safe haven’ for terrorists, France has been monitoring Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) since the late 1990s through its secret services and through Operation Sabre. For the United States, new security measures to monitor ‘Al Qaeda in Africa’ were introduced after 11 September 2001. Indeed, since the early 2000s Washington has viewed the Sahel as a space in which to test new approaches to ‘burden-sharing’ and ‘security cooperation’.48 Besides intelligence programmes and logistical arrangements (some of which are designed to support allies, including France), these include ‘train and assist’ programmes to build the capacity of regional security partners.
After the launch of Serval, in April 2013 the UN Security Council authorized a peacekeeping mission known as MINUSMA after its French title. With the deployment of MINUSMA, which also authorized French counterterrorist forces to ‘use all possible means’ to support the UN mission, the binaries of war and peace, intervention and sovereignty, ‘blurred into an emerging “new normal” of permanent military interventionism’.49
Since then most states in the Sahel have successively become sites for numerous external interventions. In August 2014, France replaced Serval with Barkhane, a regional counterterrorist operation deployed not only to Mali but also to Burkina Faso, Chad, Mauritania and Niger (together identified as the G5 Sahel Group).50 With Barkhane, any immediate exit strategy for France evaporated. As it struggles to sustain the ‘financial conundrum’ of counterterrorist operations, France is increasingly calling upon allies to share the burden of intervention endeavours in the Sahel, for example with the announcement in autumn 2019 of the Takuba initiative, which involved putting European partners’ special forces under the command of Barkhane.51
For many EU member states, some of which have long intervention trajectories in the Sahel, the perception that transnational threats of terrorism, migration and organized crime stemming from ungoverned, weak Sahelian states could directly affect Europe's own safety has triggered a new level of military engagement in the region (as distinct from long-term development engagements). We have, for example, seen a return of European troops to UN peacekeeping in Mali.52 Besides French counterterrorist operations and a UN stabilization mission, the multiplicity of international intervention actors in the Sahel also include EU training and capacity-building missions, regionally led counter-insurgency missions, and American ‘train and assist’ programmes to which a range of western allies contribute in different ways. This unsynchronized and potentially contradictory mix of intervention actors calls for careful attention not only to how interventions affect and escalate conflict dynamics, but also to dynamics among the different intervention actors themselves. Unpacking such intervention dynamics, through the lens of constitutive effects, is one of the main contributions of this special section.
Unpacking what gets constituted in the Sahelian traffic jam
Contributions to this special section explore, from different angles, the questions of what gets constituted and how by zooming in on different actors in the Sahelian security traffic jam, characterized overall by a messy coexistence of diverse justifications, contradictory logics and competing interveners. Through the three dimensions suggested below (spatial, temporal, relational), we contribute to debates about the importance of attending to ‘constitutive effects’ other than those concerning ‘sovereignty’, while of course recognizing such effects, for example as interventions link back to state formation/transformation,53 and as local actors manoeuvre in, indeed ‘tame’, the intervention space,54 for example through the pursuit of security rents.55
Now, moving to the question of ‘what gets constituted’ in the Sahelian security traffic jam, we propose to refocus this broad question by examining it through three selected dimensions (that is, these are initial investigative routes, not an exhaustive list).
Spatiality: reshaping geographical imaginaries and constructing danger zones
One important element in the literature on the various spatial imaginaries of the Sahel–Saharan frontiers, which is often taken for granted as ‘fixed’ in policy (and think-tank reports), but which is better understood as constituted, is the very spatiality of the intervention theatre. As noted above, even prior to the current intervention rush, intervening actors had competing definitions of the Sahelian intervention space. As the contributions to this special section—and other contributions to the literature—emphasize, the geographical scope of the intervention is continuously being redefined, and sometimes expanded, as intervention practices in the Sahel unfold.56 Charbonneau, for example, made this point in his analysis of how Serval and Barkhane transformed west Sahelian spatial politics.57 Similarly, Lopez-Lucia has shown how the EU's intervention practices have constitutive effects in relation to the ‘remaking’ of West Africa.58 Indeed, the Sahel ‘is’ different things for different intervention actors, and is described in variable terminology—Sahara–Sahel, G5, West Africa. These differences are not simply definitional but have implications for the very politics of intervention and the geographic reach of these practices. Differently constituted intervention spaces (in the Sahel) are inseparable from different framings of the ‘causes’ of insecurity and conflict. Furthermore, the Sahel has been constructed by several intervention actors (including the EU) and policy-makers as an intervention space in which to enact territorial border control at a distance.59 By spatial effects we also refer to the constitution of differentiated, demarcated ‘safe zones’, to be distinguished from the surrounding ‘danger zones’.60 Indeed, spatial effects sometimes become entangled with longstanding and reproduced hierarchies. Some spatial differences, created in the intervention, imply and re-enact such hierarchies with crucial implications for such factors as different intervention actors’ exposure to risks. Indeed, spatial effects are entangled with differential ‘risk economies’ that distribute danger and death to regional actors operating in the perceived ‘danger zones’.61 The notion of constitutive effects usefully calls attention to the emergence of such spatialized hierarchies during intervention practices, helping to problematize such effects.
Temporality: the logic of necessary continuity, escalation and evolving rationales for intervention
In addition to the spatial dimension, the question of what gets constituted opens up another important dimension, namely that of temporality.62 As the contributions to this special section by Sandor and Guichaoua show, various ‘temporal’ effects—such as logics of necessity or the (re)production of intervention rationale and strategy—are constituted as intervention practices unfold. That is to say, justifications for the need to intervene do not happen once and for all prior to intervention. As Guichaoua shows, the focus of France's justifications for its counterterrorist interventions has switched from avoiding attacks at home to disrupting connections between Middle Eastern foreign fighters and Sahelian jihadists. However, at times rationales for intervention can be awkwardly stubborn in the way they reproduce established ways of thinking in the corridors of power in intervening states. As Tankel shows, intervention rationales inherited from one presidential period in a different intervention theatre can linger into new administrations and be transferred into new intervention terrains. Other examples of temporality and evolving intervention effects include a progressive shift in US counterterrorist engagements in the Sahel towards a preference for military action over other instruments of national power.63 In this way, giving attention to the temporal dimension of constitutive effects of intervention practices enables the discovery of potentially escalating effects. In the Sahel, militarization has increased rapidly. Indeed, it has been argued that international interveners and their regional security partners have become targets of an ‘epidemiology of imagined radical difference’ that drives escalation.64 Finally, by zooming in on evolving rationales, it becomes possible to see how the Sahel region has been framed as a laboratory for contemporary interventionism.65 Interventions do not remain framed within one prior justification or overarching rationale. Given the historical legacies of colonial, post-colonial and development intervention rationales in the Sahel, the point to stress here is that important temporal effects emerge as intervention practices continue to unfold. Now, following more than seven years of military intervention, such temporal effects are important for our appreciation of continuing intervention endeavours in the Sahel.
Relationality: self-understandings, security partnerships and hierarchies
In view of how intervention is constitutive of specific notions of sovereignty linking back to state formation/transformation,66 we also wish to address the ways in which interventions confirm and constitute interveners ‘desired self-understandings’ and their ‘actorness’ as a relational effect of interventions.67 The relational dimension invites analyses of ‘intervention actorness’ as something which gets constituted in intervention endeavours.68 This is true for intervening states as well as at the level of institutions establishing themselves as recognizable ‘go to’ intervention actors.69 For example, as we argue in our contribution below, the EU's intervention practices in the Sahel do not simply follow from an already established profile as security intervener; rather, its ‘actorness’ is constituted during and through ongoing intervention practices. As such, certain ‘desired’, yet fragile and temporary self-understandings get constituted as intervention practices unfold. Intervening actors’ desired self-understandings are indeed relational and dependent, as Weber notes, on recognition from an interpretative community (which is also constituted rather than pre-existing).70 Yet the Sahel is characterized not by one self-understanding and one interpretative community, but by a multiplicity and diversity of intervention actors. Thus, while analyses of constitutive effects tend to focus on single intervention actors, we direct our analytical focus towards relationships between various intervention actors. Doing so reveals additional important paradoxes and disconnects. We will return to this point shortly.
As for ‘desired self-understandings’, intervention practices may also be constitutive of ‘desired security partnerships’. This process is played out at three levels: between intervening actors and the intervened-upon; between ‘like-minded’ intervening states; and within interventions. First, regarding partnerships between interveners and the intervened-upon: in the Sahel, as an intervention ‘traffic jam’, the presence of numerous external intervention actors has implications for the room for manoeuvre left for regional states. As Raineri and Strazzari argue, interventions aimed at achieving stability in the region have contributed to the ‘pragmatic’ legitimization of dubious local partners who are not in normative alignment with EU principles, leading to entrenchment of dysfunctional governance and patronage politics.71 More radically, Guichaoua argues in this special section that foreign interventions can distort relationships between Sahelian authorities and their national constituencies in ways that undermine the sovereignty of the states that foreign interveners seek to rebuild. Hence we see a dual process unfolding, whereby the constitution of interveners’ desired self-understandings (related to notions of sovereignty) occurs alongside the constitution of ‘negotiated sovereignty’ in regional states that meanwhile are increasingly ‘taming’ such external interventions.72 Indeed, states in the Sahel have become ‘highly tolerant, even encouraging, of military intervention’.73
Second, interveners often attach high priority to maintaining or establishing security partnerships with desired, like-minded allies through their contributions to interventions.74 For various European states, the Sahel has become an intervention theatre in which contributing to French-led interventions may be constitutive of new-found security partnerships, notably with France itself. Calling attention to the constituted and hence temporary and fragile nature of ‘security partnerships’ highlights an important dilemma. In responding to desired allies’ calls for contributions, a certain ‘logic of necessary continuity’ becomes visible once we appreciate that such security partnerships are ‘fragile and temporary’ effects of intervention contributions. Yet, these partnerships are simultaneously viewed as vital to the security of contributing states.
Finally, within security partnerships, hierarchies are often constituted as a relational effect of intervention endeavours.75 One example is the emergence of relational effects within missions, on the back of longstanding inequalities between intervention actors. Within MINUSMA, the All Source Intelligence Fusion Unit (ASIFU) and related practices of intelligence-sharing were constitutive of a spatialized hierarchy between so-called western ‘skiing nations’ (a NATO term for western countries) and African forces.76 By calling attention to the constitution of such hierarchical relationships, it becomes possible to critically highlight this production of intervention hierarchies within missions and between various intervention actors. Moreover, not only do hierarchies emerge along familiar North–South lines of global power relations and inequality; hierarchies are also constituted within ‘liberal interventionism’, that is, in relationships between the various liberal intervention actors operating in the same intervention space. For example, in the Sahel, hierarchies and dependencies emerge between the United States and France,77 as well as between ‘lead’ states and contributing states. French colonial and continued patrimony has given France ‘first mover advantage’ in the Sahel; other western governments readily accept this allocation of priority to the French, thereby sustaining France's ‘global grandeur’.78 The focus on intervention relations becomes a window through which we may see how intervention practices constitute particular hierarchical—yet contingent—relationships between different intervention actors, the effects of which are not grasped simply by reference to complementarity and synergy.
Thus, while acknowledging how post-structuralists paved the way for critical analyses of international interventions, we suggest that the above three-dimensional framework offers a way to examine how the notion of constitutive effects can helpfully call attention to additional effects besides that of adding meaning, temporarily, to the notion of sovereignty.
At this point, we turn to address the second of the questions identified above: looking beyond legitimations and broader discourses, what aspects or ‘component parts’ of contemporary interventions in the Sahel are constitutive?
How are effects produced? Analysing constitutive component parts of the Sahelian interventions
In refocusing the question of ‘what is constitutive’, we build upon existing scholarly work demonstrating the value of a broad conceptualization of intervention.79 This entails analyses of interventions that look at, for example, everyday practices, rumours, bureaucratic thinking and labelling as component parts of intervention that have constitutive capacity. Indeed, in line with this approach, and in contexts other than the Sahel, scholars have already looked at a broad range of ‘component parts’, e.g. biometrics in Niger, road blocks in the Central African Republic or prisons in Somalia, as constitutive rather than passive.80 The point to stress here is how we add to existing debates as we move the analysis of constitutive effects beyond a primary focus on discourse, towards appreciating a broader range of ‘component parts’ as constitutive (rather than as passive, neutral, trivial or insignificant).
Daily routines, rumours and labelling as constitutive
Looking beyond discourse practices, contributions to this special section include a focus on everyday practices, rumours and labelling as elements of intervention endeavours that must be appreciated as having constitutive effects. Building upon and adding to existing debates, it is shown how labelling, rumours and ‘daily routines of the security professionals’ have constitutive effects,81 and hence cannot be disregarded as passive or insignificant in analyses of contemporary intervention efforts. As shown in the article below by Cold-Ravnkilde and Nissen, for example, ‘“(in)securitization processes” are producing effects through the daily routines of the security professionals’.82 Indeed, intervention practitioners devote their energies to maintaining coherent representations of their actions’. Thus, when asking ‘what is constitutive’ or what generates constitutive effects once we move from prior intervention discourses and into the ‘traffic jam’ of unfolding interventions, we need to engage with the intervention practitioners, not only through official justifications and policy discourse but through the everyday practices of security professionals, UN military staff, police and EU border guards.
Combining this perspective with a broader appreciation of the very concept of intervention (incorporating a focus on component parts), we build upon such gestures towards a broader conceptualization of the constitutive as we revisit the question of constitutive effects in our analysis of ongoing interventions in the Sahel. In his contribution to this special section, Sandor zooms in on MINUSMA as he explores how information is often unverifiable, fragmented, framed to suit the agendas and practices of some over others, and based on multiple competing imaginaries of political truths. He demonstrates rumour's epistemological force and its constitutive effects on the subjectivities of communities, local political actors, and interveners.83 Other contributions show how the act of ‘labelling’ has constitutive effects. Such attention to labelling does not run counter to a focus on discourse; nevertheless, we suggest a slightly different focus, looking less at a priori discourses or legitimations and more at framings and labels that emerge during the course of intervention endeavours. This is akin to Frowd's exploration of the emergence of Niger as a so-called ‘transit state’ and ‘the production of this specific categorization and its performative effects’, demonstrating the constitutive effects of this framing in so far as it contributed to shaping ‘specific security interventions’ in Niger.84 This special section offers two additional examples of the value of attending to the constitutive effects that emerge from labelling and framings within ongoing intervention endeavours. One example is Guichaoua's analysis of France's ‘red line’ framing as constitutive of a widening ‘gap between Sahelian leaders and their domestic constituencies’.85 Another is Tankel's analysis of the US labelling of ‘partnerships’ as ‘security cooperation’. As Tankel shows, this labelling has contributed to depoliticizing how such partnerships evolved, sometimes blurring into combat operations.86 In this sense, ‘cooperation’ labels were constitutive of depoliticization when applied to specific aspects of an ongoing intervention effort. Similarly, others have argued that uses of labelling have invisibilizing effects: the label of ‘liberal peace’ misrepresents power relationships between ‘local’ and ‘international’ actors, misrepresenting how local and regional actors also respond to, shape and alter the intervention space.87
Disconnects and multiple intervention effects
Posing the two ‘constitutive effects’ questions anew (what gets constituted and what is constitutive) enables us to attend to multiple effects, thereby opening up another crucial question: how do different types of effects relate? What are the dynamics of their interplay, relations and prioritization? In the following paragraphs we address this question, calling attention to an important set of paradoxes and disconnects, for example the risk of prioritizing effects other than that of ‘reducing violence in the Sahel’. Crucially, this point speaks to the added value of reading the contributions to this special section together. Indeed, taken together, the different contributions highlight a variety of constitutive effects that facilitates appreciation of additional paradoxes and disconnects.
Disconnects: ‘self-referential’ effects, ‘local’ effects and ‘counter-effects’
A key dilemma that becomes visible once we turn our attention to questions about the relationships between a multiplicity of intervention effects is the risk of prioritizing effects other than those of reducing violence, protecting civilians and other ‘positive’ changes in local conflict dynamics. For example, ‘partnership effects’ are arguably sometimes prioritized over and beyond ‘local effects’. Yet such prioritization may rebound in unforeseen ways: the temporary constitution of intervention actors’ desired self-understandings may come into conflict with and be challenged by the emergence of counter-effects such as the production or intensification of threats. In short, by moving the study of ‘effects’ into the intervention theatre, with attention to unfolding intervention practices, it becomes possible to see how ongoing intervention practices constitute both desirable effects and effects that may challenge these constructs. In short, attending to diverse effects may reveal important paradoxes, such as the possible tension between the need for continuous intervention engagements to maintain security partnerships (as constitutive effects) and the increasing risk of what we refer to as ‘counter-effects’ entailed in continued intervention engagements.
At the same time, the violent reactions of armed jihadist groups aiming for a radically different imagined future from that envisioned by the intervention actors presented here feed into the ‘dynamics of escalation’.88 This is visible in the way that radical jihadist groups aim to defy and destroy the imagined liberal order that western intervention actors claim to provide, mimicking tactics used in Syria, Iraq and other international theatres of war.89 These radical counter-acts are met with increasingly militarized pushback from international intervention actors, whose war experience in other intervention theatres contributes to shaping their practice in the Sahel.90 Looking at a different set of counter-effects, Guichaoua shows how major political tensions between France and Sahelian countries have arisen as an effect of a protracted military presence, driven by counterterrorist aims, that has yielded disappointing results. As such, responses to and counter-effects of intervention practices illustrate how the contested performance of security actors risks generating counter-effects that may indeed challenge the temporary constitution of desired self-understandings—challenges that grow as intervention practices continue to disappoint.91
Conclusion: multiple intervention effects and implications for liberal interventionism
This special section establishes the importance of redirecting the study of liberal interventionism towards a broader range of effects, beyond debates about intended and unintended consequences or success and failure. What have we gained from doing so? Directing the analytical gaze towards constitutive effects exposes the ways in which different types of intervention effects, as well as the relations between such effects, shape continuity and change in international interventions. This, we argue, can also help explain why, despite failure to suppress violence in the Sahel, interventions continue. Moreover, it offers an important perspective on the question of what interventions do produce—and how—if peace is a ‘radical impossibility’.92 For example, the notion of constitutive effects may help explain how, at times, desired yet often unstated effects (e.g. self-understandings, security partnerships, the need to confirm to allies one's capacity to intervene)—rather than, first and foremost, the stated aim of achieving ‘on the ground’ objectives set out in mission mandates—may be crucial drivers for continuing (contributions to) interventions.
While acknowledging that questions about which constitutive effects arise in each intervention theatre are context-dependent, we have suggested and exemplified three broad categories of effects. This is not an exhaustive list, but rather a starting-point for giving due attention to the importance of the diverse effects—and ‘counter-effects’—that ongoing intervention practices produce. This framework also encourages further analysis of how these and other constitutive effects emerge in different intervention settings. Similarly, the approach presented here encourages the raising of questions about the constitutive capacities of different ‘component parts’ of contemporary interventions.
Looking at how various effects are unpacked in the contributions to this special section, it becomes apparent that multiple elements contribute to ‘intervention continuity’. First, security actors can, in important ways, perform and confirm their identity—for example, the EU as emerging security intervener—through intervention practices. Thus, as Sandor shows, the mutually constitutive relationship between performative intervention practices and intervening actors creates a certain logic of necessity and a perceived ‘need’ for interventions. Second, we see that the constitution of ‘security partnerships’ is vital to contributing states’ sense of security (particularly in an uncertain world of shifting alliances). Yet these ‘security partnerships’ are fragile constructs, whose maintenance ‘necessitates’ continuous intervention contributions. This raises issues of continuity. To maintain existing security partnerships, or seek to constitute new ones, states may perceive a need to continue making contributions to one or more interventions in the Sahel. Critically, the focus of such partnerships risks being more about the security of the contributing state than about the security of state(s) being intervened upon. Third, considering how intervention rationales are not fixed prior to, but produced and revised during, ongoing interventions raises the question of when an intervention will cease if its rationale is under constant production/revision. Finally, similar issues of continuity emerge in Sandor's analysis of how rumours produce (and are constitutive of) ‘the conditions for continual international involvement’.
The focus on multiple intervention effects also shows how several crucial disconnects cut across the relational, temporal and spatial dimensions. In different ways, contributions to this special section shed light on how—despite shared assumptions among interveners about synergy, coherence and collaboration—various disconnects are constituted during intervention practices in this crowded space. This includes a disconnect between grandiose political ambitions on the one hand and a meagre willingness to deploy, on the other; a disconnect within emerging intervention actors such as the EU;93 a disconnect between logics of necessary continuity and stated desires to withdraw or to limit future engagements. At present, paradoxically, these disconnects reveal an inbuilt tension within contemporary interventionism. As liberal ambitions take a back seat in the face of a growing number of non-liberal intervention actors, it becomes increasingly important for ‘liberal interventionism’ to achieve self-referential constitutive effects through ongoing intervention practices; yet this aim sits uneasily with a simultaneous intervention fatigue and desire to withdraw from long-term intervention engagements.
Finally, calling attention to the temporal dimension of constitutive effects, this special section also enables and encourages the discovery of potentially escalating effects. In the Sahel, militarization has increased rapidly in the course of current interventions. Initially, as Tankel shows, the framing of military interventions as ‘security partnerships’ had a depoliticizing effect and blurred the boundaries of when and where the United States (and others) were at war, while the use of force nonetheless creeps in as interventions unfold. At the same time, in a trend that is significant for the emergence of various effects, intervening actors encounter radical resistance from local actors on the ground, who equally intensify their attempts to destroy what they see as foreign occupiers attempting to colonize a space that they desire to rule. Indeed, over time and as the intervention theatre has expanded, many analysts and journalists have referred to the Sahel as ‘Sahelistan’ or the ‘French Afghanistan’.94 While such comparisons may be deficient in contextual analysis, the legacies of previous war experiences do, to a remarkable extent, come to shape incessantly recurring intervention rationales as well as the mindsets of individual soldiers deployed on the ground. As several of the contributions to this special section show, by adding a temporal dimension to analyses of effects emerging from contemporary interventions, knowledge effects of previous war experiences blend in with and produce ‘more of the same’, like the famous ‘imitative rays’ that Latour asks us to consider.95 That is, the escalating effects of interventions, while increasingly resisted by radical actors, in turn create a perceived need for more military force. And this need opens up possibilities for adding ever more new niche missions that, in turn, enable (re-)emerging security actors to enter the theatre to continue their performance as capable actors, while the situation on the ground increasingly resembles a ‘descent into hell’,96 and while the intervention space itself expand.
Footnotes
Nathalie Guibert, ‘Mali: l'armée française perd treize militaires dans un accident d'hélicoptères’, Le Monde, Nov. 2019, https://www.lemonde.fr/afrique/article/2019/11/26/treize-militaires-francais-tues-au-mali-dans-l-accident-de-deux-helicopteres_6020545_3212.html. (Unless otherwise noted at point of citation, all URLs cited in this article were accessible on 8 April 2020.)
Author's interview with local informant in Mali, Bamako, April 2019; Denis M. Tull, ‘Rebuilding Mali's army: the dissonant relationship between Mali and its international partners’, International Affairs 95: 2, 2019, pp. 405–22.
Alice Pannier and Olivier Schmitt, ‘To fight another day: France between the fight against terrorism and future warfare’, International Affairs 95: 4, July 2019, pp. 897–916.
There are multiple competing spatial imaginings of the Sahel. See e.g. Stephen Harmon, ‘Securitization initiatives in the Sahara–Sahel region in the twenty-first century’, African Security 8: 4, 2015, pp. 227–48, part of a a special issue, edited by Bruce Whitehouse and Francesco Strazzari, on how the 2012 Mali crisis and subsequent interventions are about transforming governance and political order. See Bruce Whitehouse and Francesco Strazzari, ‘Introduction: rethinking challenges to state sovereignty in Mali and northwest Africa’, African Security 8: 4, 2015, p. 222. On how the Sahel has been constructed as an object and space for international intervention before 2012, see Gregory Mann, From empires to NGOs in the West African Sahel: the road to nongovernmentality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
Bernardo Venturi, The EU and the Sahel: a laboratory of experimentation for the security–migration–development nexus, IAI working paper no. 17/38 (Rome: Istituto Affari Internazionali, 2017); Harmon, ‘Securitization initiatives in the Sahara–Sahel region’.
Jennifer G. Cooke, Boris Toucas and Kartrin Heger, Understanding the G5 Sahel Joint Force: fighting terror, building regional security? (Washington DC: Center for Strategic & International Studies, Nov. 2017), https://www.csis.org/analysis/understanding-g5-sahel-joint-force-fighting-terror-building-regional-security.
On the role of regional actors, see e.g. Niagalé Bagayoko, Le Multilatéralisme sécuritaire africain à l’épreuve de la crise sahélienne (Montréal: Chaire Raoul-Dandurand en études stratégiques et diplomatiques, 2019); Bruno Charbonneau, ‘Whose “West Africa”? The regional dynamics of peace and security’, Journal of Contemporary African Studies 35: 4, 2017, pp. 407–14; International Crisis Group (ICG), Finding the right role for the G5 Sahel Joint Force (Brussels, 2017); Nicolas Desgrais, ‘La Force conjointe du G5 Sahel ou l’émergence d'une architecture de défense collective propre au Sahel’, Les Champs de Mars 1: 30, 2018, pp. 211–20; Elisa Lopez Lucia, ‘Rethinking regionalism and the politics of regionalisation: the performance of ECOWAS's agency by Nigeria and the European Union’, Journal of International Relations and Development 21: 3, 2018, pp. 663–88; Katharina Döring, ‘The changing ASF geography: from the intervention experience in Mali to the African capacity for immediate response to crises and the Nouakchott process’, African Security 11: 1, 2018, pp. 32–58.
Though a broad range of different interventions (humanitarian, developmental, military) operate in the Sahel, and have done so for many years, this article, and the special section it introduces, focus primarily on the military dimension.
Jean-Marie Guéhenno, ‘Open letter to the UN Security Council on peacekeeping in Mali’ (Brussels: ICG, April 2017), https://www.crisisgroup.org/africa/west-africa/mali/open-letter-un-security-council-peacekeeping-mali; Cooke et al., Understanding the G5 Sahel Joint Force; Aïssata Athie, Coordinated response key to G5 Sahel Joint Force success (New York: International Peace Institute, June 2018), https://reliefweb.int/report/mali/coordinated-response-key-g5-sahel-joint-force-success; Beate Jahn, ‘Liberal internationalism: historical trajectory and current prospects’, International Affairs 94: 1, Jan. 2018, pp. 43–62; Inderjeet Parmar, ‘The US-led international order: imperialism by another name?’, International Affairs 94: 1, Jan. 2018, pp. 151–72.
Stephen Tankel, ‘US counterterrorism in the Sahel: from indirect to direct intervention’, International Affairs 96: 3, July 2020, pp. 875–93.
The variety of definitions emphasizes the political nature of defining regions as appropriate intervention space. The EU Sahel strategy of 2011 covered only Mauritania, Mali and Niger, while its 2015 regional action incorporated Burkina Faso and Chad. The UN's integrated strategy encompasses West, Central and North African countries, while placing emphasis on five core Sahel states: Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger, also defined as the G5 Sahel countries. The African Union's Nouakchott framework of 2013 includes eleven states (Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Guinea, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Algeria, Libya, Mauritania and Chad) and various regional bodies.
Many have pointed to the widespread disillusionment with liberal interventionism. David Chandler points to ‘disillusionment with liberal internationalist understandings’: see ‘International statebuilding and the ideology of resilience’, Politics 33: 4, 2013, pp. 276–86. See also Katja Lindskov Jacobsen and Troels Gauslå Engell, ‘Conflict prevention as pragmatic response to a twofold crisis: liberal interventionism and Burundi’, International Affairs 94: 2, March 2018, pp. 363–80.
Marc G. Doucet, ‘Global assemblages of security governance and contemporary international intervention’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 10: 1, 2016, pp. 116–32.
The legitimacy of the expansion and retreat of liberal interventions have been dealt with extensively elsewhere. See e.g. Chandler, ‘International statebuilding and the ideology of resilience’, p. 276; Louise Wiuff Moe and Markus-Michael Müller, ‘Counterinsurgency, knowledge production and the traveling of coercive realpolitik between Colombia and Somalia’, Cooperation and Conflict 53: 2, April 2018, pp. 193–215 at p. 195.
Bruno Charbonneau and Jonathan M. Sears, ‘Fighting for liberal peace in Mali? The limits of international military intervention’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 8: 2–3, Aug. 2014, p. 195. See also Bruno Charbonneau and Genevieve Parent, eds, Peacebuilding, memory and reconciliation: bridging top-down and bottom-up approaches (London: Routledge, 2012); Louise Wiuff Moe, ‘Counter-insurgency in the Somali territories: the “grey zone” between peace and pacification’, International Affairs 94: 2, March 2018, pp. 319–42; Jacobsen and Engell, ‘Conflict prevention as pragmatic response’.
Bruno Charbonneau, ‘Intervention in Mali: building peace between peacekeeping and counterterrorism’, Journal of Contemporary African Studies 35: 4, April 2017, p. 416.
Yvan Guichaoua, ‘The bitter harvest of French interventionism in the Sahel’, International Affairs 96: 3, July 2020, pp. 907–908.
See Christian Olsson, ‘Interventionism as practice: on “ordinary transgressions” and their routinization’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 94: 3, 2015, pp. 425–41; Doucet, ‘Global assemblages of security governance’; Shahar Hameiri, Lee Jones and Adam Sandor, ‘Security governance and the politics of state transformation: moving from description to explanation’, Journal of Global Security Studies 3: 4, 2018, pp. 463–82.
We take a broad view of interventions, one that ranges beyond the deployment of troops on the ground and the use of force against another nation. Interventions in the Sahel, given their historical roots, have clear non-military and occasionally non-security ambitions. Some such ambitions, as expressed in the concept of ‘winning hearts and minds’, reach into the social and cultural sphere. See also the definition of ‘humanitarian intervention’ offered in Louise Wiuff Moe and Markus-Michael Müller, Reconfiguring intervention: complexity, resilience and the ‘local turn’ in counterinsurgent warfare (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).
Doucet, ‘Global assemblages of security governance’, p. 117.
Barbara Delcourt, ‘Pre-emptive action in Iraq: muddling sovereignty and intervention?’, Global Society 20: 1, 2006, pp. 47–67.
Stephen Harmon argues that international efforts to contain West African political violence by reinforcing the region's governmental security structures have contributed to the spread of instability since the fall of Gaddafi: see Harmon, ‘Securitization initiatives in the Sahara–Sahel region’.
Charbonneau and Sears, ‘Fighting for liberal peace in Mali?’, pp. 192–213.
Charbonneau and Sears, ‘Fighting for liberal peace in Mali?’, pp. 192–213.
John Karlsrud, ‘The UN at war: examining the consequences of peace-enforcement mandates for the UN peacekeeping operations in the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Mali’, Third World Quarterly 36: 1, 2015, p. 47.
Philippe M. Frowd, ‘Producing the “transit” migration state: international security intervention in Niger’, Third World Quarterly 41: 2, 2020, pp. 340–58.
Tull, ‘Rebuilding Mali's army’; Séverine Autesserre, Peaceland: conflict resolution and the everyday politics of international intervention (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
Venturi, The EU and the Sahel; Philippe M. Frowd, ‘Developmental borderwork and the international organization for migration’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 44: 10, Aug. 2018, pp. 1656–72; Elisa Lopez Lucia, ‘Performing EU agency by experimenting the “comprehensive approach”: the European Union Sahel strategy’, Journal of Contemporary African Studies 35: 4, April 2016, pp. 451–68.
Charbonneau, ‘Intervention in Mali’; Arthur Boutellis, ‘Can the UN stabilize Mali? Towards a UN stabilization doctrine?’, Stability: International Journal of Security and Development 4: 1, June 2015, pp. 1–16; Chiyuki Aoi, Cedric de Coning and Ramesh Thaku, Unintended consequences of peacekeeping operations (Tokyo: United Nations University Press, 2007); Luca Raineri, ‘Human smuggling across Niger: state-sponsored protection rackets and contradictory security imperatives’, Journal of Modern African Studies 56: 1, March 2018, pp. 63–86; Eva Magdalena Stambøl, The EU's fight against transnational crime in the Sahel (Brussels: Institute for European Studies, Feb. 2019).
Cynthia Weber, Simulating sovereignty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
See e.g. Helle Malmvig, State sovereignty and intervention: a discourse analysis of interventionary and non-interventionary practices in Kosovo and Algeria (London and New York: Routledge, 2006).
David Campbell, ‘Global inscription: how foreign policy constitutes the United States’, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 15: 3, 1990, pp. 263–86.
Benjamin Schuetze, ‘Marketing parliament: the constitutive effects of external attempts at parliamentary strengthening in Jordan’, Cooperation and Conflict 53: 2, June 2018, pp. 237–58, p. 240.
David Mosse, ‘Is good policy unimplementable? Reflections on the ethnography of aid policy and practice’, Development and Change 35: 4, 2004, pp. 639–71.
Weber, Simulating sovereignty.
Mosse, ‘Is good policy unimplementable?’.
Lene Hansen, Security as practice: discourse analysis and the Bosnian War (London: Routledge, 2006).
Malmvig, State sovereignty and intervention; see also Hansen, Security as practice.
Delcourt, ‘Pre-emptive action in Iraq’.
Defined by Weber, Simulating sovereignty, as ‘justifications for intervention practices’.
We use sovereignty in the sense of the ‘ability to kill, punish, and discipline with impunity wherever it is found practiced’ (Thomas B. Hansen and Finn Stepputat, ‘Sovereignty revisited’, Annual Review of Anthropology, vol. 35, 2006, p. 296), but also as the capacity to protect through benevolence and welfare programmes (Alessandro Monsutti, ‘Fuzzy sovereignty: rural reconstruction in Afghanistan, between democracy promotion and power games’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 54: 3, July 2012, pp. 563–91).
See Weber, Simulating sovereignty: ‘This required fixing the meaning of sovereignty through intervention practices’ (p. 13). Indeed, Weber shows how constructing ‘a justification for intervening in a target state’ has important implications for ‘what sovereignty means’ (p. 16). Accordingly, studying international intervention from this perspective can yield important insights into matters such as ‘how sovereign states are constituted in practice’: Cynthia Weber, ‘Reconsidering statehood: examining the sovereignty/intervention boundary’, Review of International Studies 18: 3, 1992, pp. 199–216 at p. 200.
David Chandler, ‘Reconceptualizing international intervention: statebuilding, “organic processes” and the limits of causal knowledge’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 9: 1, March 2015, pp. 70–88 at p. 73.
Chandler, ‘Reconceptualizing international intervention’, p. 73, refers to ‘radical shifts in the formal disciplinary understanding of the concept of intervention’.
Ricardo Soares de Oliveira and Harry Verhoeven, ‘Taming intervention: sovereignty, statehood and political order in Africa’, Survival 60: 2, 2018, pp. 7–32.
On how interventions work to transform and rescale state apparatuses through a combination of coercion and capacity-building, see Hameiri et al., ‘Security governance and the politics of state transformation’.
Charbonneau, ‘Intervention in Mali’.
See Tankel, ‘US counterterrorism in the Sahel’; also Yahia H. Zoubir, ‘The United States and Maghreb–Sahel security’, International Affairs 85: 5, Sept. 2009, pp. 977–95.
Charbonneau, ‘Intervention in Mali’.
It is often stated that France, the former colonial power, in fact never left the region.
Guichaoua, ‘The bitter harvest of French interventionism in the Sahel’.
John Karlsrud and Adam Smith, Europe's return to peacekeeping in Africa? Lessons from Mali (New York: International Peace Institute, 2015).
Shahar Hameiri, Regulating statehood: state building and the transformation of the global order (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Charbonneau, ‘Intervention in Mali’.
Soares de Oliveira and Verhoeven, ‘Taming intervention’.
Adam Sandor, Assemblages of intervention: politics, security and drug trafficking in west Africa (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2016).
Mann, From empires to NGOs in the West African Sahel; Whitehouse and Strazzari, eds, special issue of African Security 8: 4, 2015; James McDougall and Judith Scheele, Saharan frontiers: space and mobility in northwest Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012); Whitehouse and Strazzari, ‘Introduction’.
Charbonneau, ‘Intervention in Mali’.
Elisa Lopez Lucia, ‘Security politics and the “remaking” of West Africa by the European Union: from bounded to fuzzy regions’, in Nadine Godehardt and Paul Kohlenberg, eds, The multidimensionality of regions in world politics (London: Routledge, forthcoming).
Luca Raineri and Francesco Strazzari, ‘(B)ordering hybrid security? EU stabilisation practices in the Sahara–Sahel region’, Ethnopolitics 18: 5, 2019, pp. 544–59; Stambøl, The EU's fight against transnational crime in the Sahel.
Cold-Ravnkilde and Nissen, ‘Schizophrenic agendas in the EU's external actions in Mali’, International Affairs 96: 4, July 2020, pp. 935–53.
Ruben Andersson and Florian Weigand, ‘Intervention at risk: the vicious cycle of distance and danger in Mali and Afghanistan’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 9: 4, 2015, pp. 519–41; see also M. Duffield, ‘Challenging environments: danger, resilience and the aid industry’, Security Dialogue 43: 5, 2012, pp. 475–92; Peter Albrecht, Signe Marie Cold-Ravnkilde and Rikke Haugegaard, African peacekeepers in Mali (Copenhagen: Danish Institute for International Studies, 2017); and Paul Higate and Marsha Henry, ‘Space, performance and everyday security in the peacekeeping context’, International Peacekeeping 17: 1, 2010, pp. 32–48.
Here, we draw attention to how meaning is ‘fixed or stabilized historically’ via prior justifications for intervention, as well as how such justifications shape continuity and the changing character of contemporary intervention practices (Weber, Simulating sovereignty, p. 3).
Tankel, ‘US counterterrorism in the Sahel’.
Lars Høier, Anja Kublitz, Stine Simonsen Purim and Andreas Bandak, ‘Escalations: theorizing sudden accelerating change’, Anthropological Theory 18: 1, Jan. 2018, pp. 36–58.
Lopez Lucia, ‘Performing EU agency by experimenting the “comprehensive approach”’.
Hameiri, Regulating statehood.
See the point made about the International Organization for Migration in Philippe M. Frowd, ‘Developmental borderwork and the International Organization for Migration’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 44: 10, Aug. 2018, pp. 1656–72.
Schuetze, ‘Marketing parliament’.
See Katja Lindskov Jacobsen and Jessica Larsen, ‘Piracy studies coming of age: a window on the making of maritime intervention actors’, International Affairs 95: 5, Sept. 2019, pp. 1037–54.
Weber, Simulating sovereignty, see e.g. p. 5.
Raineri and Strazzari, ‘(B)ordering hybrid security?’.
On how transboundary security governance regimes work to transform and rescale state apparatuses through a combination of coercion and capacity-building, see Hameiri et al., ‘Security governance and the politics of state transformation’.
Soares de Oliveira and Verhoeven, ‘Taming intervention’, p. 7. See also Sandor, Assemblages of intervention.
For a related argument, see N. Græger, ‘From “forces for good” to “forces for status”? Small state military status seeking’, in Benjamin de Cavalho and Iver B. Neumann, eds, Small state status seeking (London: Routledge, 2014), pp. 102–23.
See also Vivienne Jabri, ‘Global war and the government of populations’, Brown Journal of World Affairs 24: 1, Fall–Winter 2017, p. 100: ‘Practices of global war produce the racialization of populations, the depoliticization of conflict, and the destruction of the postcolonial polity.’
Albrecht et al., African peacekeepers in Mali; Peter Albrecht and Signe Marie Cold-Ravnkilde, ‘National interests as friction: peacekeeping in Mali and Somalia’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 14: 2, Feb. 2020, pp. 204–20.
Tankel, ‘US counterterrorism in the Sahel’.
Guichaoua, ‘The bitter harvest of French interventionism in the Sahel’.
See e.g. Doucet, ‘Global assemblages of security governance’; Olsson, ‘Interventionism as practice’; as well as contributions to debates about materiality as having ‘constitutive capacity’ See, for example, Peer Schouten, ‘The materiality of state failure: social contract theory, infrastructure and governmental power in Congo’, Millennium 41: 3, 2013, pp. 553–74; William Walters, ‘Drone strikes, dingpolitik and beyond: furthering the debate on materiality and security’, Security Dialogue 45: 2, April 2014, pp. 101–18; Katja Lindskov Jacobsen, ‘Experimentation in humanitarian locations: UNHCR and biometric registration of Afghan refugees’, Security Dialogue 46: 2, April 2015, pp. 144–64.
See, respectively, Frowd, ‘Producing the “transit” migration state’; Katja Lindskov Jacobsen, ‘On humanitarian refugee biometrics and new forms of intervention’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 11: 4, 2017, pp. 529–51; Peer Schouten, Janvier Murairi and Saidi Kubuya, ‘Everything that moves will be taxed’: the political economy of roadblocks in North and South Kivu (Antwerp and Copenhagen: International Peace Information Service and Danish Institute for International Studies, Nov. 2017); Katja Lindskov Jacobsen, ‘Intervention, materiality, and contemporary Somali counterpiracy’, Journal of Global Security Studies, publ. online Sept. 2019, https://doi.org/10.1093/jogss/ogz035.
Frowd, ‘Producing the “transit” migration state’; Didier Bigo and Elspeth Guild, Controlling frontiers: free movement into and within Europe (Farnham: Ashgate, 2005).
Cold-Ravnkilde and Nissen, ‘Schizophrenic agendas in the EU's external actions in Mali’, quoting Didier Bigo and Elspeth Guild, Controlling frontiers: free movement into and within Europe (Farnham: Ashgate, 2005).
Sandor, ‘The power of rumour(s) in international interventions: MINUSMA's management of Mali's rumour mill’, International Affairs 96: 4, July 2020, pp. 913–34.
Frowd, ‘Producing the “transit” migration state’.
See Guichaoua, ‘The bitter harvest of French interventionism in the Sahel’; also Doucet, ‘Global assemblages of security governance’, on ‘self-sustaining rationalities’ in intervention assemblages.
Tankel, ‘US counterterrorism in the Sahel’, p. 876.
See also Hameiri, Regulating statehood.
Bruno Latour, ‘Tarde's idea of quantification’, in M. Candea, ed., The social after Gabriel Tarde: debates and assessments (London: Routledge, 2010), pp. 145–62, as cited in Høier, Kubitz, Simonsen and Bandak, ‘Escalations: theorizing sudden accelerating change’, p. 8; Michèle Bos and Jan Melissen, ‘Rebel diplomacy and digital communication: public diplomacy in the Sahel’, International Affairs 95: 6, Nov. 2019, pp. 1331–48.
Author's interview with local informant in Mali, Bamako, April 2019.
Cold-Ravnkilde and Nissen, ‘Schizophrenic agendas’; Tankel, ‘US counterterrorism in the Sahel’.
See also Cold-Ravnkilde and Nissen, ‘Schizophrenic agendas’.
Charbonneau and Sears, ‘Fighting for liberal peace in Mali?’, p. 208.
Cold-Ravnkilde and Nissen, ‘Schizophrenic agendas’.
See e.g. David Francis, The regional impact of the armed conflict and French intervention in Mali (Oslo: Norwegian Peacebuilding Resource Centre, April 2013).
Latour, ‘Tarde's idea of quantification’.
Christophe Boisbouvier, ‘Général Clément-Bollée: G5 Sahel? “On va dans le mur”’, RFI, 6 June 2019, http://www.rfi.fr/emission/20190606-general-clement-bollee-g5-sahel-on-va-le-mur?ref=tw.
Author notes
This article introduces the special section in the July 2020 issue of International Affairs on ‘Disentangling the intervention traffic jam in the Sahel’, guest-edited by the authors. The authors would like to thank Helle Malmvig for providing helpful and constructive comments on an earlier version of this article; the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions; and all the special section contributors for valuable insights and debates during an authors' workshop held in Copenhagen, October 2019.
