This page lists works of an author who doesn't have a ResearchGate profile or hasn't added the works to their profile yet. It is automatically generated from public (personal) data to further our legitimate goal of comprehensive and accurate scientific recordkeeping. If you are this author and want this page removed, please let us know.
December 2024
·
20 Reads
Revue d histoire contemporaine de l Afrique
Recensé : Thomas Borrel, Amzat Boukari Yabara, Benoît Collombat, Thomas Deltombe, L’Empire qui ne veut pas mourir. Une histoire de la Françafrique, Paris, Seuil, 2021, 1008 p. Traduction : Louise Barré et Camille Evrard.
June 2024
·
6 Reads
·
4 Citations
African Security
March 2024
·
3 Reads
Modern and Contemporary France
November 2023
·
13 Reads
·
9 Citations
Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding
November 2023
Modern and Contemporary France
March 2022
·
33 Reads
·
6 Citations
European Security
Strategic narratives now face unrealistic expectations as to what they can achieve in the military field. This article asks when and how such narratives lose traction during protracted military interventions. To address these questions, which are crucial at a time when so much modern warfare takes place in the “fourth” dimension, this study develops a conceptual framework that focuses initially on the weakening of a narrative’s content and, subsequently, on its loss of normative resonance and verisimilitude. The latter two factors are beyond the control of even the most skilful strategic narrator, particularly where narratives are required to appeal to audiences with different norms. Our framework is applied to the case of France’s military operations in Mali (Serval) and the Western Sahel (Barkhane). It finds that, whereas France’s compelling Serval narrative was congruent with strong French and Malian public backing, its Barkhane narrative weakened over time, resonating less with prevailing societal norms, becoming less attuned to events on the ground and ultimately coinciding with a sharp decline in public support in France and Mali. It concludes that strategic narratives afford agency to policymakers but are constantly open to contestation and struggle to cope with diverse audiences and deteriorating “evenemential” contexts.
December 2020
·
38 Reads
·
3 Citations
November 2020
·
22 Reads
·
1 Citation
New Area Studies
Despite seven years of external military interventions to counter violent extremism, the security situation in the Sahel continues to deteriorate. Hard military approaches predominate in the region despite widespread recognition amongst Sahel specialists that the militarisation of the Sahel may actually be getting in the way of the search for a long-term political solution. This raises a number of questions that are important for Area Studies specialists: what type of information is brought into policymaking? Who produces it? How is it processed and what influence does it have? How does, or should, Area Studies fit within that? This research note argues that analysis undertaken by area specialists is indispensable in order to understand the complex nature of the various interlocking armed conflicts in the western Sahel. It suggests however that the type of thick description that characterises much area studies analysis can sometimes be too dense and too specific to be of immediate use to policymakers. Drawing on insights from Comparative Area Studies (intra-regional and crossregional comparison in particular), it explores how Area Studies could contribute more effectively to policy relevant research on the Sahel.
April 2020
·
3 Reads
Historian
March 2020
·
173 Reads
·
21 Citations
Journal of Strategic Studies
France’s interventions in Mali and the wider Sahel appear to mark a new departure in French military policy in terms of the approach to multilateralism adopted, the regionalisation of the response, and the levels of violence deployed. Yet how ‘new’ is this approach, when set against the historical backdrop of French military interventions in Africa? Should it be seen as a modified version – an adaptation – of the new type of multilateral engagement that emerged in the wake of the 1994 Rwandan genocide? Using a historical institutionalist lens, employing the notions of critical junctures, ‘layering’, and ‘drift’, this article briefly sets out the unilateral approach that marked French military policy in Africa prior to 1994 before going on to analyse the multilateral approach and associated path-dependent practices that emerged after the Rwandan genocide. Drawing on elite interviews in Europe, the US and Africa, the article shows that, while France’s engagement in the Sahel is characterised by an ostensibly novel multilateral approach, it does in fact combine new and old norms, ideas and practices.
... In a nutshell: more ad hoc and improvised. The recent mushrooming of ad hoc coalitions (Cumming et al. 2024;Reykers et al. 2023) and the number of African countries being suspended from ROs, voluntarily exiting ROs, and, again, rejoining ROs (Gänzle et al. 2024;Panke et al. 2024) illustrates this perception with rich and concrete empirical examples. ...
June 2024
African Security
... Furthermore, the impact of French intervention goes beyond just the immediate security situation. It has also had sociopolitical consequences that have negative implications (Bertrand et al., 2023). It led the peoples of the region to confront their rulers, believing that they were returning French colonialism to the region. ...
November 2023
Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding
... Many researchers have offered insightful theories to understand the logic that drives different actors in crafting strategic narratives about military operations. Research on strategic narratives in military operations centres on government decision-making (Coticchia 2015, Dimitriu and de Graaf 2016, Cumming et al. 2022, with some attention to media and opposition parties (Swimelar 2018, Curini and Vignoli 2021, Hansson et al. 2023. Surprisingly, however, there has been little research on the actors responsible for these operations, the armed forces. ...
March 2022
European Security
... However, area-based knowledge can also be 'rich, deeply embedded and locallyderived' (Chafer, Stoddard and Toltica, 2020) even when this has at times presented a problem for the discipline, which was accused of lack of rigour and producing unusable knowledge. Much of the critique was based on an idea that globalisation has rendered area knowledge obsolete, given globalisation's homogenising force (Basedau and Köllner, 2007, p. 107). ...
November 2020
New Area Studies
... Some view French intervention as a form of economic exploitation and a continuation of historical imperialism (Chafer, 2020;Guichaoua, 2020;Marchal, 2021;Egbewatt, 2023). They argue that the intervention only serves to protect French interests, particularly in the form of resource extraction and control. ...
December 2020
... where Niger, Burkina Faso, and Mali have withdrawn from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) due to the latter's support for foreign intervention to overthrow the military juntas in the region (Chafer et al., 2020;Guichaoua, 2020;Mann, 2021;Pigeaud & Sylla, 2024). United by their objective of ejecting France, the former colonial power, and the US from their countries, the military leaders of these three states withdrew from ECOWAS and established the Alliance of Sahel States in 2023, with support from Russia and a collective security pact (Asadu, 2023;Balima & Mazou, 2023;Millar, 2024). ...
March 2020
Journal of Strategic Studies
... Security studies has tackled the relationship between security and regions with various strategies, 2 all of which tend towards a functionalist approach to the study of region-building processes -which are mainly seen as the rational and functional security responses of nation-states to a diverse combination of factors (Kelly, 2007). Partly moving away from previous approaches, in recent years various scholars have embraced the argument first advanced by Pinar Bilgin (2004) and begun to investigate the co-constitutive relationship between security and space and to explore the struggle for power and ruling positions that lies behind security regionalism (Charbonneau, 2017a;Döring and Herpolsheimer, 2018;Lopez Lucia, forthcoming). At the same time, most of these contributions focus their analysis on the regionalizing and security discourses and practices of formal agents -international interveners, regional organizations or governmental elites -implicitly privileging a top-down approach to their object of inquiry. ...
October 2017
Journal of Contemporary African Studies
... roli poszczególnych państw w tym związku, korzyści i strat wynikających z tych relacji, motywacji państw afrykańskich, jak i samej Francji. Stawiano pytania o to, czy Françafrique jest nadal aktualna i potrzebna (Ndaye, 2010;Chafer, 2017). Asumpt do rozpoczęcia dyskusji dał ekonomista François-Xavier Verschave, który w swoim eseju z 1999 r. zatytułowanym La Françafrique. ...
April 2017
Modern and Contemporary France
... ). Entre eles, a AQMI merecia uma atenção especial por possuir a possibilidade de conduzir atentados terroristas e promover sequestros de reféns internacionais e tráfico de drogas, o que era visto como uma ameaça à segurança da Europa(Keenan, 2014, p. 29; Notin, 2014;Chafer, 2016). Além disso, os GAJ eram capazes de tomar territórios e exercer efetivamente seu controle (Utley, 2016; Boeke e Schuurman, 2015). ...
July 2016
International Journal of Francophone Studies
... The Exceptionalism is « the idea that a person, country or political system can be allowed to be different from, and perhaps better than, others » (https:// dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/exceptionalism). The notion of exceptionalism is necessarily comparative and suggests a norm to which others countries adhere and to which France does not.The claim of French exceptionalism is found in relation to many domains, from cooking to industrial relations, from language to the economy, from cinema to foreign relations (Hewlett, 2005) Regarding the cultural domain for example, the notion of « French cultural exception » aquired salience during the 1993' Uruguay Round for GATT negociations when France led European countries opposition to U.S. proposals for deregulating the audiovisual industries (Godin and Chafer, 2004). ...
January 2004
