Counter-Insurgency Governance in the Sahel 

Counter-Insurgency in the Sahel

Bruno Charbonneau is a Professor of International Studies and Director of the Centre for Security and Crisis Governance (CRITIC) at the Royal Military College Saint-Jean & the Founder and Director of the Centre FrancoPaix in Conflict Resolution and Peace Missions of the Raoul-Dandurand Chair at the Université du Québec à Montréal and an editorial board member of the academic journal International Peacekeeping, Canada.

January 2012, Tuareg rebels allied with jihadist armed groups conquered the northern territories of Mali. Later in March, humiliated and angry at ‘the state’s incompetent management of the crisis’, [i] an element of the Malian army toppled the government in Bamako. In January 2013, arguing that Mali was a destabilizing threat to the West African region and the ‘close neighborhood’ of Europe, French President François Hollande ordered the launch of Operation Serval. The military intervention was to be a short-term affair to stabilize the situation by eradicating the jihadist terrorist groups that threatened, according to the French government, the territorial integrity, the state, and the capital of Mali. The French would then pass the mantle to the UN and African partner organizations, which would do the work of political reconciliation and reconstruction of the Malian state and army.

Things did not go according to the French plan, or indeed anyone’s plan. Since 2013, the multiplication of regional and international strategies and actions directed at stabilizing Mali and the Sahel, countering and preventing violent extremism, capacity-building local actors, and so on, has not improved the security situation. Arguably, some of this activity has made things worse. [ii] Academics talk of a ‘security traffic jam’, where ‘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’. [iii] As jihadist armed groups surged back into action in 2017 and spread to Niger and Burkina Faso, the Malian army was an entity in a permanent state of being ‘capacity-built’, [iv] yet able to organize not one but two coups d’état in August 2020 and May 2021, arguably embarrassing international actors and further derailing their plans for stabilizing Mali. In June 2021, the culminating effects of years of the ‘bitter harvest of French interventionism’, [v] two coups in Mali, and the death of Chad’s President Idriss Déby (also followed by a coup) led to French President Emmanuel Macron’s announcing the end, or at least the transformation, of Operation Barkhane. [vi]

This article sets aside the question of success or failure to analyze and emphasize the type of political order and regional governance that has been and is being built in the Sahel by international actors. It develops the concept of counter-insurgency governance to point to the influence of counter-insurgency principles and their infusion into philosophies of governance. Counter-insurgency doctrine and associated practices are extracted from military thinking, and thus understood as more than tactical or operational activities executed by military personnel, as more than the actions of soldiers, but as having a framing and structural effect on political possibilities and practices of governance. In this sense, counter-insurgency does not simply inform the military techniques of combat but is politics. On this basis, the article argues that international interventions in the West African Sahel are informed, enabled, and enacted through counter-insurgency principles. In doing so, it attempts to theorize and make sense of what is considered here to be a permanent state of intervention in the Sahel — counter-insurgency governance that insists on a set of power relations and configurations that imposes limits, parameters, and boundaries on the purpose of Sahelian states, governments and governance, and the forms they ought to take. This theoretical work highlights how intervention commitments in the Sahel are not (technical) solutions to local and regional problems—an ‘internal’ conflict to be solved by ‘external’ actors—but a (reactive) mode of ruling that takes part in the constitution of the objects and subjects it seeks to secure or govern. While many scholars have analyzed the disparate factors that led to the Malian war and regional instability, or have focused on the various limits of international actors’ strategies, there has been too little theorizing of what has been and is being developed in Mali and the Sahel since Serval and Barkhane. [vii]

The article proceeds by first theorizing counter-insurgency governance to analyze critically the politics of counter-insurgency thought, practice and effect, and the relationships between these elements. It politicizes military doctrine and practices. The second section describes the principles of counter-insurgency and the emergence of a regional counter-insurgency architecture in the Sahel and West Africa. The last section discusses the question of emerging political orders in the Sahel, their importance, and their effects on possibilities in the Sahel.

Theorizing counter-insurgency governance

The purpose of theorizing counter-insurgency is to analyze the political logic and effects of military thinking and to interrogate the assumptions sustaining ideas about the use and the utility of military force. The theoretical perspectives, the narrative frames, the discursive strategies, and the conceptual issues relating to or inspired by counter-insurgency do not simply respond to ‘threats’ somehow, whether in the Sahel or elsewhere. They affect and transform the meaning and formation of Sahelian states and the Sahel region. As Pinar Bilgin argued about the ‘Middle East’, ‘both the concepts “region” and “security” need to be opened up to reveal the mutually constitutive relationship between (inventing) regions and (conceptions and practices of) security’. [viii] Practices of security, including the military use of force, contribute to the production or constitution of the objects and subjects that are to be secured and governed; to the formation of states, regions, regional security communities, and regional dynamics of conflicts. [ix] To put it another way, counter-insurgency is more than a way of war. It is social thought that is co-constituted by resistance to its practices. [x]

Counter-insurgency thinking and wars have a long history. The classic starting point is usually the approach developed in the nineteenth century by the French general Maréchal Bugeaud or his compatriot officers Joseph Simon Gallieni and Louis Hubert Gonzalve Lyautey, who claimed the primacy of political action over military operations. The colonial experience of the French armies, prolonged by the decolonization wars in Indochina and Algeria and the many military interventions that followed independence, constructed a legacy and gave rise to the ‘French School’ of counter-insurgency. [xi] Twentieth-century French officers such as David Galula and Roger Trinquier featured prominently in the development of American counter-insurgency doctrine, even making a comeback during the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns when US General David Petraeus often expressed his admiration for the French army and military thought. [xii]

Counter-insurgency is usually conceived of as a military doctrine, a theory of military practice, and one that has been historically controversial in military circles.[xiii] While there are differences between its proponents, its core claims are stable: the ‘population’ is at the heart of the fight between insurgents and counter-insurgents; the primacy of politics is paramount; development or social engineering work is necessary to sustain the effects of military victories, and close civil-military relations are essential to success. [xiv] Grounded in imperial history, the early development of counter-insurgency thinking is inextricably linked to colonial wars that sought to conquer, exterminate, pacify or integrate populations resisting colonial rule. A key point of debate has always been whether colonial wars differed from other wars: this question informed both the evolution of counterinsurgency doctrine and the debates about whether such a doctrine was warranted in a post-colonial world.

Vincent Joly argues that what distinguished colonial wars from others was not their violence per se, but their justifications. Colonial warfare justified its terror methods by reference to a normative distinction between wars in the colonies and the ‘civilized’ wars of Europe. The belief that non-Europeans were culturally inferior translated into the ‘gun becoming the best vector of civilization’. [xv] The non-European other had little or no political legitimacy, and its resistance was more often than not interpreted as banal and cowardly criminality. Military actions carried out based on such assumptions were conceived of as offering limited strategic value for European powers: thus the early twentieth-century use of the label ‘small wars’ to delegitimize the armed resistance of the colonized. Historian Dierk Walter argues that the Callwell-inspired ‘small wars’ distinction ‘is based on a fiction of international law’ that ‘established an intellectual tradition which, until the late twentieth century, implicitly took the imperial side’. The language of small wars was ‘designed to downplay the significance of the enemy’. [xvi] Douglas Porch also writes that the tradition of the small war ‘is continued by [the US Marines manual] FM 3-24, that views insurgents as beneath the respect accorded combatants by the laws of war’. [xvii] Tarak Barkawi points out that after 9/11, such wars ceased to be small, but that the same imperial and Orientalist constructions still informed western perceptions of war, security threats, and terrorism. [xviii]

The objectives of the colonial wars were absolute. The conqueror was there to stay and to subdue the local populations. Superior technology and military tactics allowed European powers to limit their material and human commitments, but colonial wars had no time limits. Given that there was no declaration of war or conditions for peace, military campaigns could turn into everlasting processes of ‘pacification’ or ‘imperial policing’, until they became codified into philosophies of governance. [xix] Its proponents as ‘armed social work’ reflected this codification in the frequent definition of counter-insurgency; the soldier must take part in, or at the very least, support, community work, reconstruction (schools, hospitals), mediation, economic development and so on. [xx] The general idea of counter-insurgency is grounded in colonial assumptions about the need to civilize, govern and/or control subject populations, reflecting an ‘intellectual and practical preoccupation that has long concerned those charged with the business of conquest’. [xxi] To attain these objectives when faced with populations conceived of as vulnerable or threatening, counter-insurgents argue that there is a need to prioritize ‘security’ and thus unify political and military powers in the hands of the military commander-as-administrator. The moral entitlement and obligation to intervene rests on racist, othering, and simplistic ideas of the character of development intervention. Although ‘beating swords into plowshares’ may be an evocative metaphor for the move from morally justified destructive violence to morally justified productive work, [xxii] the justifications remain linked in the twenty-first century in the security’s form-development nexus. [xxiii] This logic of counter-insurgency points not too small or colonial wars as distinctive types of wars, but to how the language of small wars and its iterations justified the violent imposition of order or ‘civilization’. Using force (or security, or stabilization) comes second because it is enacted at the limits of ‘civilization’, development, or freedom as defined by the colonizer and under context-specific conditions.

Counter-insurgency governance

How does counter-insurgency transform or translate into philosophies of governance? For Patricia Owens, counter-insurgency wars played a significant role in the ‘dissemination of social governance’. While scholars have debated the relevance and efficacy of waging wars according to counter-insurgency doctrine, there is very little theorizing of counter-insurgency ‘as a distinctive type of government’. [xxiv] Owens asks: ‘If the conflict between insurgents and counterinsurgents is a “competition in government”, a form of “applied political science”, and victory is achieved through social administration, then what is the nature of the government offered through counterinsurgency rule?’ [xxv] During the late colonial wars, ‘military strategists sought to create units of rule over local populations to the end of defeating insurgents’, using the ‘correct combination of force and politics [to] socialize, pacify and domesticate a population into regulating itself’. [xxvi] For Owens, the essence of counter-insurgency is the creation of governable populations for the counter-insurgent power.

Counter-insurgency is more than the military tactics of conquest or stabilization, more than an external intervention into or onto an object: it is a forceful intervention that seeks to build the target of its rule and the legitimate modes of political expression. This rule can take different forms—it may be direct and centralized or indirect and decentralized—but it is based on forced collaboration on grounds of military necessity. That counter-insurgency doctrinaires repeat ad nauseam the primacy of politics and the necessity for social or development work does not make the doctrine’s practices any less forceful, nor does it weaken the political impact of military action and the claims to military necessity; but it does point to the secondary position of security/stabilization as a mechanism for disseminating, promoting or imposing philosophies of ‘proper’ and ‘civilized’ development, or ‘good enough’ governance. For Christian Tripodi, what emerges within counter-insurgency is ‘a powerful set of assumptions about the role of military power as an instrument of change… an instrument suitable for ambitious social engineering and the radical change of native political traditions’. [xxvii] For Walter, counter-insurgency is politics that, instead of creating military conditions for political victory, ‘incorporates political measures into the military sphere, subjects them to military logic, and makes them into ancillary methods for winning’—to which he adds that ‘nowhere is this so pronounced as in the French tradition’. [xxviii]

How does it work in practice? What form does counter-insurgency governance take in the twenty-first century? There is no single or simple answer. As Owens argues, it varies, is context-specific, and is co-constituted by resistance to it:

[The] structure and dynamics of social regulation changes the level of organized resistance; the resources available to the counter-insurgency state; the perceived racial ‘Otherness’ of the target population and other racialized and gendered practices; and the degree of external support provided to insurgents. [xxix]

To interrogate how distinct and competing warfare, practices inform philosophies and practices of governance in the Sahel, the former practices must be viewed alongside welfare and development practices to encompass direct, indirect, structural, and symbolic violence as part of the legitimacy-seeking activities of the state and international actors. Such an expansive approach to the post-2012 moment in the Sahel allows us to subject the security-development nexus to the critical interrogation its merits. How are the limits to political order and rule, governance, violence, and well-being, to security and development, established and enacted so that international military intervention becomes integral to the continued existence of Sahelian states?

That the objective is not to compare current military operations in Mali and the Sahel to colonial wars. Roland Paris, for instance, once tried to ‘save’ liberal peacebuilding by arguing that the context of such intervention was not the conquest of the colonial era, as the intent of liberal peacebuilders was not domination or empire-building. [xxx] Michael Shurkin makes a similar comparison between French colonial counter-insurgency as a tool to rule, whereas he conceives contemporary counter-insurgency as post-colonial and seeks to leave as soon as possible after helping ‘that country shore up its legitimacy’. [xxxi] Such comparisons have proved useful in defending contemporary practices and rejecting criticisms of them. They are common arguments that are founded on assumptions about the working principles of state sovereignty and international law to dismiss accusations of imperialism and neo-colonialism. But their method of comparison is deeply ahistorical and obscures ‘how power and power relations involved in establishing limits and boundaries to define, categorize and understand the world through comparison are intimately tied to conflict and intervention practices and dynamics’. [xxxii] The issue is not one of comparison, of similarities or differences, but one of the colonial legacies. [xxxiii] If there is one thing to emphasize, it is how colonial encounters bequeathed a legacy of assumptions and attitudes that have shaped counter-insurgency into our day, beginning with the claim advanced by Callwell and Lyautey that small wars constituted a distinct category of warfare whose practitioners deserved professional deference. [xxxiv]

Counter-insurgency governance in the Sahel frames the post-2012 moment as necessitating perpetual military operations. The Malian, Nigerien, and Burkinabè states are—in particular, albeit to different degrees—foregrounded as pre-eminent sites of collaboration and contest among national and international actors precisely in the pursuit of means to address ‘terrorism’ and various crisis-level problems that result from ‘internal’ dysfunctions deemed to require new forms of governance. The failure of the post-colonial state is part of the space in which counter-insurgency governance can exist and take shape. Interventions in the Sahel are extensive international engagements that have transformed and are transforming regional and national security management and governance, involving a multitude of global governance structures and transnational elite networks (inclusive of African elites) that normalize the use of force based on claims about its necessity for the possibility of politics. The military intervention incorporates ‘development’ and ‘holistic approaches’ into its logic only if doing so normalizes and legitimizes the use of force. As one French analyst put it, ‘if there is no political objective beyond justifying the use of force, there can be no end in sight to the French operations’. [xxxv] In the Sahel, the distinctive feature of counter-insurgency governance seems to be perpetual war.

Principles of counter-insurgency governance in the Sahel

There are two core sets—or sites—of principles of counter-insurgency governance in the Sahel. The first set finds its most explicit expression in French military doctrine, in the French ‘global approach’ to the Sahel, and, more precisely, in the 2014 spatial and temporal expansion of French operations. When President Hollande ordered Operation Serval, [xxxvi] it was limited in time and confined within the territorial borders of the Malian state. Intended to establish military control of the country and recover the territorial integrity of the Malian state, it was conceived as a ‘bridge’ between the French forces and the Malian armed forces, the UN, and other actors that would then engage in peace talks and implement political solutions. [xxxvii] Yet French troops never left, and Serval was transformed into Barkhane.

This transformation was more radical than most dare to admit. While Barkhane was and is many things, in 2014, it was Serval’s ‘exit strategy’. Serval was the tactical military success that needed to be preserved in the face of mounting evidence of strategic failures. [xxxviii] It was also the basis of France’s new strategic and ‘global approach’; one based on an expansion of the French military’s spatial and temporal horizons. In 2019, the chief of staff of the French armed forces, Army General François Lecointre, described France’s global approach to the Sahel ‘as a crisis management strategy centered on the Sahel’s populations and their perceptions regarding the development of the crisis. We have inherited this concept from our colonial adventure.’ According to the general, the ‘French know-how’ was inherited through colonial conquests ‘from Gallieni to Lyautey’. Today, as in the past, he argued, victory comprises ‘winning the hearts and minds of the populations to whose aid we come in the regions we seek to stabilize’; and ‘military gains we get will be worth nothing if they don’t result in political agreements and tangible actions leading to economic and social development’. [xxxix]

Operation Barkhane meant that, spatially, French troops would henceforth operate regionally, across and within the borders of the G5 Sahel states, in response to a problem characterized as transnational. Barkhane marked West African places, spaces, and territories as a transnational Sahel battleground for the fight against terrorist forces, an object and space of intervention, a so-called ‘ungoverned’ terrain for the production of novel forms of security governance. [xl] Temporally, Barkhane was and is conceived of in terms of the longue durée and as a contribution to the global war on terror. It is envisaged as a necessity for the very possibility of politics—a necessity to enable and allow the development of Sahelian state formation and nation-building. Barkhane both superimposed the Sahel ‘region’ on, and separated it from, the Malian state—which was the original target of the Serval intervention—by articulating the practices of individuals, terrorist groups, or Barkhane as applicable to ‘ungoverned spaces’, a discursive framing of ‘times, places and subjectivities in which modern sovereignty is expressed only as an absence’ that justifies intervention. [xli] In short, Barkhane allows the French government to claim that its military mission is essential to establish and execute the logic and activities of the security-development nexus. Its regional reach enables the French government to claim that it does not interfere in the internal affairs of Sahelian states, as it also redraws the regional map and the legitimate boundaries of modern politics.

French military and diplomatic leadership are central to understanding counter-insurgency governance in the Sahel, but crucial to this leadership are the support of the American government—notably in terms of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities [xlii]—and the EU, via its multiple missions and funding schemes, [xliii] and the collaboration of African regimes (see next section). This support for French leadership is intimately tied to the second set of principles found in the resolutions of the UN Security Council. Key organizational, institutional, and legal parameters of international intervention in the Sahel are defined by and through the mandate—and its various interpretations—of the UN Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA). The strategic priorities of MINUSMA have remained constant since its creation in 2013: to support stabilization efforts, to restore the Malian state authority, and, since 2015, to help in the peace’s implementation agreement. [xliv] Crucially, the mandate has also provided legal cover for a range of actors and activities, notably the French, the EU, and the G5 Sahel. Resolution 2584 of June 2021 reiterated MINUSMA’s support ‘when applicable’ for the G5 joint force (under Resolution 2391), for the EU missions, the Malian armed forces, the Takuba task force, [xlv], and the French forces. The last is authorized ‘within the limits of their capacities and areas of deployment, to use all necessary means… to intervene to support elements of MINUSMA’. [xlvi]

The mandate and strategic priorities of MINUSMA reflect the operational challenges and constraints on action that the international norm of state sovereignty and its associated rules and procedures impose on international actors—hence the emphasis on state authority and the peace process. Yet, it is the concept of ‘stabilization’ that does most of the discursive and normative work in the mandate by allowing and enabling various interpretations, and thus an array of actions and interventions that can bypass the Malian state or local concerns—and cross Malian borders. It is possible to argue, as Susan Woodward points out, that UN operations have always aimed to stabilize, given that they have no strategic leverage and thus must focus ‘on minimizing the level of violence and human rights abuses while the strategic level [is] sorted out internationally’. [xlvii] But in the past 20 years, scholars of UN peacekeeping have also argued that stabilization has had profound political effects, both on the practices of UN peacekeeping and peacebuilding and conflict dynamics and the prospects for conflict resolution. [xlviii] Because the term ‘stabilization’ is ambiguous and encourages various interpretations and narratives of security threats, it introduces competing interpretations of international law and competing interests in missions. Arguably, it also creates a shared language and understanding between NATO states. [xlix] ‘Stabilization’ refers simply to the idea of maintaining something in a position of equilibrium, fixing it in a certain state, preventing it from changing; or creating the conditions for maintaining a specific state. But as the language of stabilization is linked to the restoration of state authority, stabilization reveals its counter-insurgency roots. [l] Recent debates about the militarization or robustness of UN peacekeeping are tacit reflections on the impact of the legacies of the global war on terror and NATO’s operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. [li]

Some scholars and practitioners have defended the boundaries of UN peacekeeping by demanding clarification of the concept of stabilization. Chiyuki Aoi and Cedric de Coning acknowledge that stabilization and counter-insurgency have similar principles:

Where the threat to stability is an insurgency and a decision is made to counter it, stabilization then becomes counter-insurgency: Hence, counter-insurgency is a subset of a broader stabilization concept… when the threat to stability is terrorism, stabilization could include elements of counter-terrorism. [lii]

This is a common framing, but still in no way useful because all such attempts at clarifying conceptual boundaries obscure the fact that they depend on prior distinctions—on political judgments that distinguish between actors in a conflict (seen variously as combatants, insurgents, or terrorists) and between different interpretations of the conflict. Relying on ‘conceptual clarity’ or referring to international law are attempts at avoiding or obscuring the politics of such judgments. Hence, international interveners work with, need, and make such distinctions, but in ways that deny the politics of the exercise and its transformative effects on conflict dynamics. For instance, the French army document Doctrine for counter-insurgency at the tactical level is very clear about identifying conflict actors. In ‘COIN operations’, according to the doctrine, one of the legal frameworks of engagement is ‘terrorist actions led by an insurgency’. We consider insurgency the normal framework of international law, but terrorism is another context that brings a different interpretation: ‘The law of armed conflict considers terrorist actions as an illegal method of combat. This means that the Force is legally protected in its coercive actions against terrorists.’ [liii] Given that ‘there is no internationally accepted definition of terrorism’, [liv] as the doctrine admits, in a stroke, the French doctrine enables the shift in labeling from insurgent to terrorist and legally justifies unlimited ‘coercive actions’ against the latter.

An emerging regional counter-insurgency structure

The previous section examined the discursive, normative, and legal justifications for a ‘division of labor’ between military operations and political solutions to stabilize Mali; [lv] but that separation—and in particular its military elements—has expanded beyond Malian borders. Regarding Mali, an officer remarked that the division of labor between the French and the UN was ‘less synchronized and synced’ than other examples:

For instance, there appears to be little to no Barkhane interest in MINUSMA intelligence, other than the security and operational concerns shared in Gao, where the UN and Barkhane bases coexist. Month after month, spikes in Mopti region violence or inter-communal massacres did not trigger a security response. I do not recall a single example of the same occurring with information shared with a US Joint Operations Centre, which would promptly forward it to its UN liaison personnel. In Mali, if the information had no targeting or counterterrorism value, Barkhane appeared uninterested or not designed to process it. We repeated that the deteriorating security situation mattered… What is the point of hammering nails if the house crumbles? [lvi]

Contrary to this officer’s perceptions, there have been multiple points of contact between French and UN personnel, but the international engagement in the Sahel is rooted in a mindset and framework according to which the French-led troops use force while others do politics and development work. This division of labor is made possible by the varied and many contributions—military, financial, diplomatic, development, capacity-building, and so on—of UN agencies, the EU, and EU member states (for example, there are German, Belgian, and Italian troops in Niger), European states’ contributions to MINUSMA or the Takuba task force, the United States, the G5 Sahel, and Sahelian states, and the tacit approval of African regional organizations. This ensemble of (competing) actors, policies, and programs have been described as a ‘security traffic jam’; analysts have emphasized the failures, the ‘differences and disagreements’ and the diversity of ‘unsynchronized intervention actors’, and the contradictions and disconnections among them. [lvii] It seems more useful to think of this ‘traffic jam’ as a governance apparatus. Taken together, their practices constitute counter-insurgency governance: a set of power relations and configurations that emphasize the ‘terrorist threat’ and enact the conditions for perpetual intervention. This governance is imperfectly coordinated, incomplete, and in flux. It reacts and adapts to local acts of disturbance or resistance (such as jihadist attacks and expansion, or coups d’état). Its agendas and policies can collide in attempts at managing conflicts. Yet, ultimately, many actors and activities converge in the construction of an emerging regional security governance structure.

They found this emerging security governance structure on the counter-insurgency principles described above (the French ‘global approach’ and the principle of stabilization). African military experiences also informed it, with a heavy dose of adaptation and influence drawn from NATO’s experiences in Afghanistan. French military officers, as much as their UN counterparts, speak openly of securing populations and building zones of stability for development [lviii]—through the promotion of counter-insurgency buzzwords like ‘oil spots’, [lix] 3D or integrated approaches, or the newest formulation, the ‘integrated territorial approach’. [lx] The theory is that these secured zones render possible the construction or consolidation of peace and the state, and the restoration of state authority and control over increasing areas of the national territory. Continually referring to the security-development nexus—or some version of it—is the hallmark of this philosophy of governance: the military creates the space for development practitioners and predetermined political solutions; these must take advantage of military successes and comply with the requirements of military strategy. It is worth quoting General Lecointre again: ‘Military gains we get will be worth nothing if they don’t result in political agreements and tangible actions leading to economic and social development.’ [lxi] They conceived the G5 Sahel based on the security-development nexus, which is the core functioning principle and justification mechanism of the organization. But to this day, the security-development nexus remains ‘wishful thinking [because] nobody seems to know how to make it happen on the ground’. [lxii]

The foundation of this regional security governance in Operation Barkhane is not static—indeed, it has arguably been in transition since its conception. Even in 2015, French military officers argued that its area of operations should have been larger. [lxiii] Its operation and transformation are also influenced by variable levels of collaboration and cooperation from African states. In contrast to the anti-French sentiments of Bamako’s military junta, in November 2017, the French and Ivorian governments announced the creation of the International Counter-Terrorism Academy (Académie internationale de lutte contre le terrorisme). On 21 December 2020, they signed the official intergovernmental agreement in Abidjan, in the presence of presidents Emmanuel Macron and Alassane Ouattara. Based in the Ivorian city of Jacqueville, near Abidjan, the academy is defined as a bilateral initiative for an international project whose objectives are to support African countries in the fight against the terrorist threat, strengthen cooperation between African states, and strengthen Franco-Ivorian cooperation. It is composed of two training pillars. The first is a school for managers in positions of responsibility within the ministries of justice, the interior, and the armed forces. The ambition is to promote a global approach to the challenges of terrorism, from intelligence to judicial treatment, through the actions of police and specialized forces. ‘Senior executives’ are trained in intelligence and targeting, the management of terrorist crises, judicial and criminal investigations, prevention, and special operations. This pillar is intended to offer interministerial scalable courses. The second pillar is for ‘special units’. It offers training facilities for shooting and tactical scenarios in a diversity of environments (urban, maritime, lagoon). French elite units: special operations command, gendarmerie, or national police intervention groups underwrote the camp and its training programs. A strategic research institute that will produce and share doctrines, threat analysis, and feedback between the various partners will support these two pillars. As of April 2021, it claims to have trained 300 students from a dozen African countries in fighting and managing a terrorist crisis. [lxiv] So far, the French Direction has fully funded it de la coopération de sécurité et de défense (Directorate for Security and Defence Cooperation). [lxv]

The academy is meant to support and be complemented by the construction of the West African Intelligence Centre (WAIC—Centre de renseignements en Afrique de l’Ouest). WAIC is to be led by a French officer and its offices will be in Dakar. Its area of interest includes the G5 Sahel countries, plus all countries to the south, from Senegal to Cameroon (17 countries). Its structure, functions, and objectives remain to be specified, but WAIC is meant to offer a regional perspective on security challenges, contribute to strategic intelligence, and possibly contribute to but not directly support military operations. [lxvi]

Taken together, the Abidjan and Dakar initiatives suggest the further multilateralization of the French approach in the Sahel, entrenching and developing its multilateralizing practices since the 2000s in the search for new legitimizing and risk-sharing mechanisms for French interventions. [lxvii] The combination of Barkhane, the Takuba task force, the US and European military presence in Agadez (Niger), the EU’s Sahel training missions, the G5 Sahel joint force, MINUSMA, and the consolidation of partnerships with 17 African states hints at a potential and fundamental transformation of West Africa’s security governance—one that calls into question the relevance of the Economic Community of West African States in security matters. [lxviii] In this context, Macron’s June 2021 announcement about the end of Barkhane was neither surprising nor radical, but in line with recent policy developments.

Starting in 2020, French counterterrorist operations slowly switched from combat teams on tactical deployments to ISR-based targeting. Introducing French armed drones into operations, coupled with American ISR support, [lxix] has brought drone strikes into the mainstream, thus diminishing the need for so many French ground troops. [lxx] Hence, we are witnessing a slow and difficult, yet steady, transition in the military posture in the Sahel—the construction of a new regional security architecture. A likely future scenario would see Sahelian national armies (or the G5 Sahel force) form a sort of special forces coalition with the Takuba task force as the latter increases its support for and engagement with the former. [lxxi] This first coalition would assume most of the ground risk, while a Franco-American-led coalition of ISR drone actors would (continue to) conduct remote strikes and strategic oversight. The academy would train the African allied troops and senior management, while the WAIC could act as the formal strategic center for defining and building this security architecture. Whether the French will permit the transformation of Barkhane into a coalition remains to be seen, but the announcement that NATO’s support and procurement agency will provide logistical support for Takuba is a strong positive indication. [lxxii] A coalition would allow the French to tie in their American and European allies, while French leadership would secure special relationships with African states. In such a scenario, the effects on MINUSMA are uncertain, but the division-of-labor logic could hold—MINUSMA would be tasked, so to speak, with ensuring the implementation or renegotiation of the 2015 peace accords, while UN agencies and various partners would do development work. As a Canadian officer put it:

The cooperation between Barkhane and USAFRICOM [United States Africa Command], French special forces, and USSOCOM [United States Special Operations Command], although not optimal, is unprecedented and on a clear uptrend. Presently, there are several other efforts by France that should improve the division of labor and its synchronization. It is a much overdue change in French attitude. In this aspect, they are taking some steps towards federating and enabling COIN [counter-insurgency] principles. [lxxiii]

Counter-insurgency governance and emerging political orders

The symptoms and effects of military operations in the Sahel are well documented. While jihadist insurgents have continued to strike, French operations have contributed to intercommunal tensions and conflicts, and drone strikes have caused an increasing number of civilian casualties. [lxxiv] The national armies of Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso are now known for being more deadly than jihadist armed groups. [lxxv] Benjaminsen and Ba point to ‘state-sponsored counter-insurgency’, whereby the Malian state supports proxy forces—local militias—that do its bidding, thus enabling control and repression while allowing dissociation from primary responsibility for fuelling intercommunal violence. [lxxvi] In short, the focus on countering jihadist groups through military means has created an incentive structure for pursuing violent repression under the name of counterterrorism. The language of counterterrorism is used to claim an exception — to avoid the laws of war—and normalizes the use of force by many parties. This makes MINUSMA’s peacekeeping mission just that much harder. [lxxvii] Alienated populations conflate the French, national armies, and UN peacekeepers, and increasingly turn to insurgent groups for protection and security, and governance. In the words of a French diplomat, ‘every international action creates incentives to not solve the crisis’. [lxxviii]

The common critique of the failures of international intervention in the Sahel has opposed military to political solutions. The argument is that the security or military focus leads to unintended consequences and limited political options. The alternative is to foreground political solutions, with an emphasis on governance, development, and/or the restoration of state authority. [lxxix] While correctly pointing to the negative effects of military solutions, this critique falls short of the mark. The analytical mistake is to consider military or security solutions as separate from politics, instead of the form of politics that they are, sustain and promote. [lxxx] Adopting the military–politics binary has the unfortunate effect of reproducing the dichotomy that sustains counter-insurgency thinking: that the space for politics must first be created through the use of military force. This common approach is largely grounded in or inspired by the critique of militarism and militarized approaches. [lxxxi] However, as Frowd and Sandor have argued, the militarism critique cannot account for the complex interactions and fragmented forms and practices of security found in the Sahel: ‘Interventions are often too fragmented for a single direction of travel towards martial violence—militarization—to hold for long.’ [lxxxii]

Interventions in the Sahel are indeed fragmented. Yet, under the shared presumptions of the security-development nexus,[lxxxiii] the counter-insurgency logic sustains a plethora of military actors and their civilian counterparts: international organizations, development practitioners, stabilization consultants, and humanitarian enterprises. For instance, the EU, as one of the key external actors in the region, in its 2011 Sahel strategy emphasized the security-development nexus, while the 2021 strategy was reorientated towards ‘governance’, albeit without filling the concept with much meaning or substance. [lxxxiv] Whether it is the security-development nexus or an emphasis on governance, funds, and investments to rebuild or develop the state is substantially insufficient and overly concerned with technical matters. [lxxxv] For Delina Goxho, the EU’s strategy reflects how ‘the mantra of stabilization through good governance has seeped into EU policy rhetoric on the Sahel’. [lxxxvi] Stabilization through governance or development has enabled the outsourcing of European security interests and agendas, [lxxxvii] and ‘externalized’ European borders into Africa. [lxxxviii] So not that governance talk in and about the Sahel is hollow; [lxxxix] the question is, rather, about the form of governance that is wanted or prioritized.

The key question is, therefore, the set of power relations and configurations that counter-insurgency governance imposes or seeks to impose. These relations and configurations form the conditions of possibility that enact and enable particular limits and boundaries on emerging forms of governance and political organization in the Sahel. The interactions and collisions between competing orders are framed by post-colonial legacies of military and development interventions: the international management of the post-2012 crisis is set against the historical backdrop of self-sustaining aid arrangements and dependencies that have been characterized by some as the ‘politics of permanent crisis’ in sub-Saharan Africa. [xc] Before 2012, foreign aid dependence was ‘a key component of the political and institutional life of Sahelian states’; it shaped the identity of the region, and ‘paved the way for a project of massive re-engineering of politics in the Sahel’. [xci] In Mali, for instance, the perpetual intervention has rested on the construction of populations conceived as problematic, whether anti-revolutionary (as under Modibo Keita), regime enemies (as under Moussa Traore) or immature citizens needing democratic consciousness-raising (since Alpha Konaré). [xcii] Both before and after 2012, populations have been construed as the problem because of their poverty and vulnerability, as both at risk and risky for regime stability, thus neglecting legacies of interventions and dependency structures. [xciii]

It is in this historical context that Hüsken and Klute can argue that the post-2012 moment is nothing less than ‘the renegotiation of the postcolonial order’. [xciv] Bøås and Strazzari also argue that, despite the jihadist challenge in the Sahel, ‘what is actually at stake today is nothing less than political order(ing), with modes of governance and societal sustainability very much part of the problem’. [xcv] Such work is based in part on a critique of the ‘ungoverned space’ narrative. As Klute summarizes, these authors describe and analyze forms of governance beyond that of the modern state to ‘unveil the notion of ungoverned spaces as a normative term at the center of which stands the Western state model’. [xcvi] Jihadist and armed groups are conceived of as political actors—not irrational terrorists—who deploy a variety of practices and strategies to rule in a direct challenge to state sovereignty and international authority. [xcvii]

Such necessary and much-needed work focuses on rebel governance, and to some extent on what it means for state formation. Yet, such approaches have largely neglected the international conditions of these localized emerging modes of governance. Counter-insurgency governance in the Sahel has worked effectively to minimize sustained engagements—beyond the use of force—with competing for normative orders, sites of authority and legitimacy, and non-state-centric governance. [xcviii] Yet, as military efforts have failed to even bring a modicum of stability to the security situation, we observe the formation of a regional strategy to manage, suppress, and contain the emergence of alternative philosophies and modes of governance—one that permits the transformation of a regional security governance architecture. The result is that international actors offer little to no conflict resolution beyond recourse to endless military interventions.

Conclusion

Counter-insurgency in the Sahel is simultaneously a mode of governance and a web of political practices and contestation that has failed miserably at producing or facilitating the creation of governable spaces and populations under the authority of sovereign states. Instead, it reproduces its logic of perpetual intervention as integral to the possibility of Sahelian states. We find its practices, among other locations, in the construction of a regional security apparatus that reproduces the Sahel as an ‘ungoverned space’ in need of perpetual military intervention.

It is unclear what such international conditions mean for the future of Sahelian states and societies—even more so if one adds to the current challenges of a global pandemic and climate change. But it seems very unlikely that sustaining the conditions for perpetual war will lead to the peaceful resolution of Sahelian conflicts.

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[i] Author interview with Malian ambassador, location undisclosed to preserve anonymity, March 2017.

[ii] According to the quarterly reports on Mali of the UN Secretary-General, the situation has steadily deteriorated since 2015. A similar sentence is found again and again: ‘The security situation in the Sahel subregion continued to deteriorate.’ See UNSC, Situation in Mali: report of the Secretary-General, UN Doc. S/2021/519 (New York, 1 June 2021).

[iii] Signe Marie Cold-Ravnkilde and Katja Lindskov Jacobsen, ‘Disentangling the security traffic jam in the Sahel: constitutive effects of contemporary interventionism’, International Affairs 96: 4, 2020, p. 857.

[iv] Denis M. Tull, ‘Rebuilding Mali’s army: the dissonant relationship between Mali and its international partners’, International Affairs 95: 2, 2019, pp. 405–22.

[v] Yvan Guichaoua, ‘The bitter harvest of French interventionism in the Sahel’, International Affairs 96: 4, 2020, pp. 895–911.

[vi] In 2014, the French government declared Serval a success and fused it with Operation Epervier (in Chad since 1986) to create Operation Barkhane, whose area of operation covered the territories of what have become known as the G5 Sahel countries: Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, Chad and Mauritania.

[vii] I will discuss some exceptions in the concluding section. These include Morten Bøås and Francesco Strazzari, ‘Governance, fragility, and insurgency in the Sahel: a hybrid political order in the making’, International Spectator 55: 4, 2020, pp. 1–17; Bruce Whitehouse and Francesco Strazzari, ‘Introduction: rethinking challenges to state sovereignty in Mali and northwest Africa’, African Security 4: 8, 2015, pp. 213–26; Thomas Hüsken and Georg Klute, ‘Political orders in the making: emerging forms of political organization from Libya to Northern Mali’, African Security 4: 8, 2015, pp. 320–37; Bruno Charbonneau and Jonathan Sears, ‘Fighting for liberal peace in Mali? The limits of international military intervention’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 8: 2–3, 2014, pp. 192–213.

[viii] Pinar Bilgin, ‘Whose “Middle East”? Geopolitical inventions and practices of security’, International Relations 18: 1, 2004, pp. 25–41.

[ix] Bruno Charbonneau, ‘Whose “West Africa”? The regional dynamics of peace and security’, Journal of Contemporary African Studies 35: 4, 2017, pp. 407–14.

[x] Patricia Owens, Economy of force: counter-insurgency and the historical rise of the social (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

[xi] Vincent Joly, Guerres d’Afrique: 130 ans de guerres coloniales, l’expérience française (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2009). On French counter-insurgency, see Michael Shurkin, ‘France’s war in the Sahel and the evolution of counter-insurgency doctrine’, Texas National Security Review 4: 1, 2020, pp. 36–60.

[xii] Elie Tenenbaum, ‘Pour une généalogie atlantique de la contre-insurrection’, in Georges-Henri Bricet des Vallons, ed., Faut-il brûler la contre-insurrection (Paris: Choiseul, 2010), pp. 23–61.

[xiii] Douglas Porch, Counter-insurgency: exposing the myths of the new way of war (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

[xiv] For a representative example, see David Kilcullen, Counter-insurgency (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010)

[xv] Joly, Guerres d’Afrique, p. 28.

[xvi] Dierk Walter, Colonial violence: European empires and the use of force (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), p. 79. Major-General Sir Charles Edward Callwell (1859–1928) is a key figure who popularized the concept with his 1896 book, Small wars, which inspired, among others, the US Marine Corps 1935 Small wars manual and the renewed study of ‘asymmetric warfare’ and ‘small wars’ in the 1990s.

[xvii] Porch, Counter-insurgency, p. 26.

[xviii] Tarak Barkawi, ‘On the pedagogy of “small wars”’, International Affairs 80: 1, 2004, pp. 19–37.

[xix] Owens, Economy of force.

[xx] ‘This is a very, very strong identity and cultural feature of our troops’: author interview with French army general of the Marine Troops, Paris, Nov. 2004.

[xxi] Christian Tripodi, The unknown enemy: counter-insurgency and the illusion of control (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), p. xi.

[xxii] Thank you to Jonathan Sears for the formulation.

[xxiii] In fact, the ‘ploughshares’ or development trope ‘ignores the way militaries use infrastructure to pacify intransigent populations and incorporate conquered peoples and places into global systems of rule’: Laleh Khalili, ‘The roads to power: the infrastructure of counter-insurgency’, World Policy Journal 34: 1, 2017, p. 94.

[xxiv] Owens, Economy of force, pp. 9–10.

[xxv] Owens, Economy of force, p. 24.

[xxvi] Owens, Economy of force, pp. 45, 157.

[xxvii] Tripodi, The unknown enemy, pp. 11, 66.

[xxviii] Walter, Colonial violence, p. 108.

[xxix] Owens, Economy of force, p. 43.

[xxx] Roland Paris, ‘Saving liberal peacebuilding’, Review of International Studies 36: 2, 2010, pp. 337–65.

[xxxi] Shurkin, ‘France’s war in the Sahel’, p. 4.

[xxxii] Bruno Charbonneau and Adam Sandor, ‘Power and comparative methods: performing the worlds of armed conflicts’, Civil Wars 21: 4, 2019, p. 437.

[xxxiii] Bruno Charbonneau, ‘The imperial legacy of international peacebuilding: the case of Francophone Africa’, Review of International Studies 40: 3, 2014, pp. 607–30.

[xxxiv] Porch, Counter-insurgency, pp. 75–6.

[xxxv] Author interview with independent French consultant, ex-secret service, Paris, April 2016.

[xxxvi] Whether desirable or not, to some Malians Serval was the ‘formalization’ of an inevitable intervention: group discussion with three Malian academics, Bamako, April 2015

[xxxvii] Author interview with French diplomat, New York, March 2017; author interview with French military officer, État-major des armées, Paris, April 2016.

[xxxviii] Serval is used as an example of operational success for future military intervention. See Christopher Chivvis, The French war on Al Qa’ida in Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). On the strategic limits of Barkhane and the failures of the French strategy, see Emmanuel Goffi, Opération Barkhane: entre victoires tactiques et échec stratégique (Montreal: Centre FrancoPaix, 2017).

[xxxix] Assemblée nationale (France), Compte rendu 12, Commission des affaires étrangères (Paris, 6 Nov. 2019; author’s translation).

[xl] Bruno Charbonneau, ‘Intervention in Mali: building peace between peacekeeping and counterterrorism’, Journal of Contemporary African Studies 35: 4, 2017, pp. 415–31.

[xli] R. B. J. Walker, After the globe, before the world (New York: Routledge, 2010), p. 210.

[xlii] Stephen Tankel, ‘US counterterrorism in the Sahel: from indirect to direct intervention’, International Affairs 96: 4, 2020, pp. 875–93.

[xliii] Signe Marie Cold-Ravnkilde and Christine Nissen, ‘Schizophrenic agendas in the EU’s external actions in Mali’, International Affairs 96: 4, 2020, pp. 935–53

[xliv] See UN Security Council Resolutions 2100 (2013), 2164 (2014), 2227 (2015), 2295 (2016), 2364 (2017), 2423 (2018), 2480 (2019) and 2531 (2020).

[xlv] Takuba is a special operations task force integrated with Barkhane to train and advise Malian forces and accompany them into combat. It was declared ‘fully operational’ at the end of March 2021. Under French command, it includes contributions from Estonia, Czechia, Denmark, Sweden, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Portugal.

[xlvi] UN Security Council Resolution 2584, UN Doc. S/Res/2584, 29 June 2021.

[xlvii] Susan L. Woodward, The ideology of failed states: why intervention fails (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), p. 234.

[xlviii] This literature is huge. See, among others, David Curran and Charles Hunt, ‘Stabilization at the expense of peacebuilding in UN peacekeeping operations’, Global Governance 26: 1, 2020, pp. 46–68; Emily Paddon Rhoads, Taking sides in peacekeeping: impartiality and the future of the United Nations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

[xlix] According to a Canadian high-ranking military officer, who served in MINUSMA in 2018–19, ‘everything we [NATO militaries] do and did in Mali is coloured by counter-insurgency thinking’. Discussion with author, Ottawa, Sept. 2019. See also Curran and Holtom, who trace stabilization doctrines back to approaches developed by NATO states: David Curran and Paul Holtom, ‘Resonating, rejecting, reinterpreting: mapping the stabilization discourse in the United Nations Security Council’, Stability 4: 1, 2015, pp. 1–10.

[l] Tripodi considers counter-insurgency and stabilization to be synonyms in doctrinal texts, as ‘ultimately stabilization means different things to different actors engaged in the same process… The United States… views stabilization as being a subset of COIN, whereas UK doctrine views the relationship in entirely the opposite terms’: Tripodi, The unknown enemy, p. 41.

[li] John Karlsrud, The UN at war: peace operations in a new era (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).

[lii] Chiyuki Aoi and Cedric de Coning, ‘Towards a United Nations stabilization doctrine: stabilization as an emerging UN practice’, in Cedric de Coning, Chiyuki Aoi and John Karlsrud, eds, UN peacekeeping doctrine in a new era (New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 296–7.

[liii] Armée de terre, Ministère de la Défense, Doctrine for counter-insurgency at the tactical level (Paris: Centre de Doctrine d’Emploi des Forces, 2010), p. 17.

[liv] Armée de terre, Ministère de la Défense, Doctrine for counter-insurgency at the tactical level.

[lv] Charbonneau, ‘Intervention in Mali’.

[lvi] Author’s email exchange with Canadian army officer who served in Mali in 2019, Feb. 2021. This exchange was corroborated by another discussion with a Canadian air force officer, Ottawa, Oct. 2019.

[lvii] Cold-Ravnkilde and Jacobsen, ‘Disentangling the security traffic jam in the Sahel,’ p. 858.

[lviii] For instance, one UN official mentioned the need to ‘clean the country’ [Mali] of terrorists before reconstruction: author interview with UN official, New York, Feb. 2017

[lix] Author interview with European colonel, MINUSMA military command, Bamako, April 2017.

[lx] After his election in 2017, Macron imposed his version of a 3D doctrine, notably on the military and the Agence française de développement (AFD), causing some eyebrow-raising among bureaucrats (author’s observations at several groups and individual discussions at the AFD, Paris, Feb. 2018). See also Alliance Sahel, ‘Sahel: une approche de l’aide adaptée aux zones fragiles’, press release, 10 May 2021, https://www.alliance-sahel.org/actualites/sahel-une-approche-de-laide-adaptee-aux-zones-fragiles/. (Unless otherwise noted at the point of citation, all URLs cited in this article were accessible on 27 Sept. 2021.)

[lxi] Assemblée nationale (France), Compte rendu 12

[lxii] Nicolas Desgrais, ‘La force conjointe du G5 Sahel, nouveau mythe de Sisyphe?’, Conversation, 17 July 2018, https://theconversation.com/la-force-conjointe-du-g5-sahel-nouveau-mythe-desisyphe-99803.

[lxiii] Author’s conversations with several French officers, Paris and Bamako, April 2015.

[lxiv] At the time of writing, the academy is still being built and is not fully operational. COVID-19 has slowed the construction of its infrastructure. The details in this paragraph are drawn from open sources and email exchanges with military personnel between February and May 2021. See, among others, Ministère de l’Europe et des Affaires Etrangères, Afrique: création d’une académie internationale de lutte contre le terrorisme, n.d., https://ambafrance.org/Afrique-creation-d-une-academie-internationale-de-lutte-contre-le-terrorisme?xtor=RSS-1; Economic Community of Central African States, L’académie internationale de lutte contre le terrorisme au menu des échanges entre l’ambassadeur de France et le Président de la Commission de la CEEAC, 12 March 2021, https://ceeac-eccas.org/presidence/lacademie-internationale-de-lutte-contre-le-terrorisme-au-menu-des-echanges-entre-lambassadeur-de-france-et-le-president-de-la-commission-de-la-ceeac/.

[lxv] This directorate is part of the French Ministry of European and Foreign Affairs. It ‘reflects the coherence of France’s bilateral and multilateral cooperation actions, in the “defense–security” and “security–development” continuum’: https://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/fr/dossiers-pays/afrique/securite-et-lutte-contre-le-terrorisme/cooperation-de-securite-et-de-defense-en-afrique/#sommaire_2.

[lxvi] From an internal document of the Direction du renseignement militaire, Ministère des armées, France, dated July 2020, in the author’s possession. It must be emphasized that the WAIC is still in the defining and planning stages.

[lxvii] Benedikt Erforth, ‘Multilateralism as a tool: exploring French military cooperation in the Sahel’, Journal of Strategic Studies 43: 4, 2020, pp. 560–82; Bruno Charbonneau, ‘Dreams of Empire: France, Europe, and the new interventionism in Africa’, Modern and Contemporary France 16: 3, 2008, pp. 279–95.

[lxviii] See Elisa Lopez-Lucia, ‘A tale of regional transformation: from political community to security regions’, Political Geography, vol. 82, Oct. 2020, article 102256, DOI: 10.1016/j.polgeo.2020.102256. This shows how international security activities, notably those of the EU, are rewriting West Africa’s security geography by creating regions such as the Sahel.

[lxix] Americans publicly acknowledged, for instance, that their ISR assets contributed to the French killing of the leader of Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, Abdelmalek Droukdal, in 2020: Rukmini Callimachi and Eric Schmitt, ‘French military says it killed top Quaeda leader in Africa’, New York Times, 6 June 2020.

[lxx] ‘More than 40 percent of Barkhane’s air strikes are now conducted by drones’, according to Denis Tull, ‘Operation Barkhane and the future of intervention in the Sahel’, SWP Comment, 5 Jan. 2021.

[lxxi] G5 Sahel states are hard at work trying to convince the UN to fund their military operations; that, according to Paul Williams, would mean that the UN would be funding national armies doing counterterrorism within national borders, thus setting a dangerous precedent. Paul D. Williams, ‘Why a UN support office for the G5 Sahel Joint Force is a bad idea’, IPI Global Observatory, 8 June 2021, https://theglobalobservatory.org/2021/06/why-a-un-support-office-for-the-g5-sahel-joint-force-is-a-bad-idea/.

[lxxii] Laurent Lagneau, ‘Sahel: le soutien logistique du groupement européen de forces spéciales Takuba sera assuré par une agence de l’Otan’, Zone militaire, 14 June 2021, http://www.opex360.com/2021/06/14/sahel-le-soutien-logistique-du-groupement-europeen-de-forces-speciales-takuba-sera-assure-par-une-agence-de-lotan/.

[lxxiii] Author’s email exchange with a Canadian officer who served in Mali in 2019, April 2021.

[lxxiv] MINUSMA-Division des droits de l’homme et de la protection, Rapport sur l’incident de Bounty du 3 janvier 2021, UN doc., March 2021.

[lxxv] Héni Nsaibia, ‘State atrocities in the Sahel: the impetus for counter-insurgency results is fueling government attacks on civilians’, ACLED, 20 May 2020, https://acleddata.com/2020/05/20/state-atrocities-in-the-sahel-the-impetus-for-counter-insurgency-results-is-fueling-government-attacks-on-civilians/.

[lxxvi] Tor A. Benjaminsen and Boubacar Ba, ‘Fulani–Dogon killings in Mali: farmer–herder conflicts as insurgency and counter-insurgency’, African Security 14: 1 2021, pp. 4–26, DOI: 10.1080/19392206.2021.1925035.

[lxxvii] Louise Wiuff Moe, ‘The dark side of institutional collaboration: how peacekeeping–counterterrorism convergences weaken the protection of civilians in Mali’, International Peacekeeping 28: 1, 2021, pp. 1–29.

[lxxviii] Author interview with French embassy diplomat, Bamako, April 2017.

[lxxix] What these concepts amount to in practice for the Sahel is unclear. According to one UN official, in Mali, ‘rule-of-law is the end-state of governance’: author interview with UN rule-of-law officer, New York, Dec. 2013.

[lxxx] I am slightly simplifying the debate, but the military–politics binary nevertheless expresses the parameters of conflict management in the Sahel; and it comes with a pre-defined program of actions. The binary is found both in the literature and in the ‘field’. I heard and observed it at work in several places. Two examples include my participation in a UN peacekeeping review team during the summer of 2020 (online) and in a two-day workshop in Uganda in November 2019, where UN civilian participants often blamed military hawks for the failures of intervention.

[lxxxi] Marta Iñiguez de Heredia, ‘Militarism, states, and resistance in Africa: exploring colonial patterns in stabilisation missions’, Conflict, Security and Development 19: 6, 2019, pp. 623–44; Vanessa Gauthier Vela, ‘MINUSMA and the militarization of UN peacekeeping’, International Peacekeeping, publ. online July 2021, DOI: 10.1080/13533312.2021.1951610

[lxxxii] Philippe Frowd and Adam Sandor, ‘Militarism and its limits: sociological insights on security assemblages in the Sahel’, Security Dialogue 49: 1–2, 2018, p. 74.

[lxxxiii] See Woodward, The ideology of failed states.

[lxxxiv] Council of the European Union, The European Union’s strategy in the Sahel—Council conclusions, EU doc. 7723/21 (Brussels, 16 April 2021).

[lxxxv] Catriona Craven-Matthews and Pierre Englebert, ‘A Potemkin state in the Sahel? The empirical and the fictional in Malian state reconstruction’, African Security 11: 1, 2018, pp. 1–31.

[lxxxvi] Delina Goxho, ‘Pivoting stabilization in the Sahel: competing visions and implementation checkpoints’, Security Praxis, 25 May 2021, https://securitypraxis.eu/pivoting-stabilisation-in-the-sahel-competing-visions-and-implementation-checkpoints/.

[lxxxvii] Luca Raineri, ‘(B)ordering hybrid security? EU stabilisation practices in the Sahara–Sahel region,’ Ethnopolitics 18: 5, 2019, pp. 544–59.

[lxxxviii] Philippe Frowd, ‘Borderwork creep in West Africa’s Sahel’, Geopolitics, publ. online March 2021, DOI: 10.1080/14650045.2021.1901082.

[lxxxix] Alex Thurston, The hollowness of ‘governance talk’ in and about the Sahel (Milan: Italian Institute for International Political Studies, 13 April 2021).

[xc] Nicolas van de Walle, African economies and the politics of permanent crisis, 1979–1999 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). See also Gregory Mann, From empires to NGOs in the West African Sahel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 201

[xci] Isaline Bergamaschi, ‘Aid in the Sahel in the 2000s: tales of dependence and appropriation’, in Leonardo Villalón, ed., The Oxford handbook of the African Sahel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).

[xcii] Jonathan Sears, ‘State legitimacy in Mali: crisis, contest, (re)construction’, Peace Research, forthcoming 2022.

[xciii] Vincent Bonnecase, La pauvreté au Sahel: du savoir colonial à la mesure internationale (Paris: Karthala, 2011).

[xciv] Hüsken and Klute, ‘Political orders in the making’, p. 320.

[xcv] Bøås and Strazzari, ‘Governance, fragility, and insurgency in the Sahel’, p. 3. See also Whitehouse and Strazzari, ‘Introduction’

[xcvi] Georg Klute, ‘Postface: emerging orders in the Sahel?’, International Spectator 55: 4, 2020, p. 133.

[xcvii] For a review of the literature, see Natasja Rupesinghe, Mikael Hiberg Naghizadeh and Corentin Cohen, Reviewing jihadist governance in the Sahel, working paper no. 894 (Oslo: Norsk Utenrikspolitisk Institutt, 2021).

[xcviii] Charbonneau and Sears, ‘Fighting for liberal peace in Mali.’

.