In the afternoon of January 11, 2013, two Gazelle helicopters with French Special Forces on board took off from an airbase in Burkina Faso. A while later, they opened fire on a group of militants gathered in the Malian steppe. Despite the suddenness of the attack, the group was able to respond and engaged the special forces in a firefight leaving several militants and one French pilot, Damien Boiteux, dead. Only a few hours later, four Mirage fighter jets of the French Air Force took off from N’Djamena to unload their superior firepower on a rebel hideout in Konna, a small town and strategic point at the center of the country. Fifty militants died in the attack. More special forces were flown into Bamako, and an armored regiment based in Côte d’Ivoire set out for Mali. Operation Serval was launched and France was at war.
Over the course of the next weeks, the number of French troops deployed to Mali increased steadily and exceeded 4500 by early February making Operation Serval the largest French foreign intervention since the Algerian War. The military campaign was triggered by President François Hollande’s decision to help Mali safeguard its sovereignty by stopping the advancing rebel forces and eradicating criminal and terrorist groups, which were gaining ground on Malian territory.
Twelve months later, French troops received the president’s orders to intervene in another African conflict. This time French military action followed the adoption of UN Resolution 2127 on December 5, 2013. French troops based at M’Poko airport in Bangui had already been reinforced during the month of November. Within hours of the presidential order, an additional 600 troops landed in the Central African Republic (CAR) to curb the sectarian violence that was afflicting the country. Operation Sangaris was launched. Although less spectacular than the blitz campaign in Mali, the peacekeeping mission was not less dangerous. Two decades after the Rwandan genocide, French soldiers were once again entrenched in a civil war where frontlines were blurred and the distinction between perpetrators and victims not always clear.
At first sight, these two tableaus are strong reminders of the early post-colonial era when French troops in Africa still numbered 60,000, and France was the uncontested guarantor of stability in its former African colonies. At that time, French paratroopers intervened on a regular basis to support or topple African governments very much at Paris’s discretion. Above descriptions, however, do not belong to some distant past but to the present era of asymmetric warfare and the global struggle against non-state actors, in common parlance known as the Global War on Terror (GWoT).
This book reflects on France’s new interventionism in Africa by examining the decision-making processes that have led to the two military operations in Mali and the CAR and seeks to understand the core factors that drive France’s current policies in the region. It questions the decision-makers’ perceptions and mental maps and thus provides a set of reasons that explain the Hollande administration’s willingness to deploy troops in two conflicts within France’s former colonial sphere.
Over the last decade or so, Africa has played a more central role in the global system. Increased investment opportunities pique the interest of all major world powers and have made the African continent a crowded, highly attractive, and heavily wooed fairground for both state and non-state actors (Carmody 2011, 1; Severino and Ray 2011). China has been one of the most active players in Africa (Alden 2007), but the United States, Russia, Brazil, India, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia have also been establishing themselves as the preferred partners of several African countries competing over access to resources and markets. This substantial economic interest in the African continent is accompanied by an increased emancipation of African state actors on the international scene and the simultaneous marginalization of traditional foreign actors (read: former European colonial powers).
Besides the cornucopia of resources and the many still unsaturated markets that stir the blood of investors, Africa’s security and the continent’s (in)stability have attracted the attention of all major global powers. In contrast to the economic sphere, the realm of security remains more resistant to change and reproduces old patterns of an established hierarchical order. Traditional foreign actors from the Global North continue to dominate the discourse and impose many of the security practices in place. Despite repeated claims for African ownership in the security sector, Africa remains the region that is subjected to most foreign interventions in the world. While in the past colonial and neo-colonial aspirations as well as Cold War strategic and ideological thinking justified foreign intervention on the continent, more recently references to global security, the striving for liberal peace as a response to continuous civil wars, humanitarianism, bad governance (usually framed more euphemistically as “lack of good governance”), migration, and rising religious fundamentalism often linked to Islamist terrorism are said to have made foreign military interventions necessary (Ignatieff 2003; Barnett 2011; Schmidt 2013; Reid 2014).
In the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, George W. Bush, who during the 2000 presidential election campaign had declared that the African continent had no strategic importance to the United States, made “Africa one of his strongest legacies” (Lyman and Robinette 2009, 2). The Bush administration identified an arc of instability as prone to the genesis of anti-Western terror networks reaching from Somalia in the East to Mauritania in the West of Africa (Keenan 2009). Likewise, the Obama administration demonstrated great interest in African defense and development policies to the point where even critics, who had doubted the reorientation in the United States’ policy toward Africa, acknowledged that “U.S. policy makers have altered their conception of national interests in the region” (van de Walle 2009, 3). Thanks to the advocacy work of U.S. state actors and others, the “banana theory” of terrorism, according to which terrorist groups dislodged on a banana-shaped route from the Middle East to Africa, quickly began to establish itself as a dominant narrative within the Western-led global security discourse and gave rise to security-driven bilateral cooperation programs as well as to the more encompassing Pan Sahel Initiative (PSI), the Trans-Saharan Counter-Terrorism Partnership (TSCTP), and the African Peace Facility (APF) (Keenan 2007, 2009). In addition, the U.S. military established its Africa Command (AFRICOM) in 2007.
The belief in the interrelatedness of security and development as cause and remedy of Africa’s ills is shared among all major global powers. In 2011, the European Union (EU) mobilized €600 million as part of its Strategy for Security and Development in the Sahel. The rapidly increasing migration from Africa to Europe over the past decade has made the EU and its member states look more closely toward their southern neighborhood (Connor 2018).
This new interest in Africa also made the international community turn to those powers who had a longstanding experience in military interventionism and showed continuous interest in crisis management in the region. With its considerable track record of military interventions in Africa, France soon became the United States’s most important ally in its sub-Saharan counter-terrorism strategy and the EU’s “framework nation” on African security (The Economist 2014). In addition to the expectations of the international community and France’s allies in the West, it is the continuous demand on the part of the African ruling elites that has made France a particularly sought-after actor when it comes to security in Africa, notably francophone Africa (Schmidt 2013, 11).1 Notwithstanding the repeated promises by French decision-makers to reduce their country’s military activity in the region, French troops have participated in nine military operations on the African continent since the turn of the millennium. Both Africa’s salience on the international security agenda and France’s reinvigorated role as security provider in Africa ask for a re-examination of French security policies and defense strategies in Africa at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
Following the March 2011 Franco-British air-strikes that helped topple Moammar al-Gadhafi’s regime in Libya and France’s alleged involvement in the arrest of former Ivorian President Laurent Gbagbo in April 2011, 2013 marked the return of the infamous gendarme de l’Afrique.2 Within less than two years of assuming office, the Hollande administration pushed for military intervention in Mali and deployed a peacekeeping force to the CAR. In stark contrast to France’s persistent vows to reduce its military presence in Africa, the 2010s saw the country unable to stay away from its traditional backyard. This is surprising, to say the least, given the non-interventionist approach to foreign policy that the Hollande administration advocated initially. A complete withdrawal from Afghanistan, further cutbacks to the national defense budget, the firm commitment to put an end to the existing defense agreements between France and its former African colonies—a process that had already begun under the Sarkozy administration—as well as the affirmation to reduce France’s permanent military presence in sub-Saharan Africa to the strict minimum figured prominently on the Socialist government’s political agenda (Mélonio 2011, 31). Of course, one could dismiss such statements as void of meaning; words, however, were followed by deeds. French troops returned from Afghanistan and the annual defense budget for the period 2014–2019 was reduced to 1.5 percent of France’s gross domestic product (€31.4 billion p.a.) entailing a cut of 34,000 posts between 2014 and 2020. Furthermore, given the restructuration of the former African cell, as well as President Hollande’s apparent indifference to African affairs, and the highly praised and promoted narrative of African solutions to African problems, it seemed that the Socialist government indeed reconfigured its overall defense policy and was finally putting into practice the long-heralded yet never fully realized break with France’s traditional approach to the African continent. The signs were set on change and all the greater was the surprise when President Hollande tipped this carefully constructed narrative of a rupture in the making by ordering a large counter-terrorist operation in the Sahel and subsequently committing troops to a peacekeeping operation in Central Africa (Notin and Blanchard 2013).
This mismatch between discourse and practice persisted throughout both operations. French troops had barely set foot on Malian soil when policy-makers in Paris announced the ephemeral nature of the mission and started evoking a withdrawal of troops. The French daily newspaper Libération (2013) quotes Hollande on January 15, 2013, as saying, “France has no vocation to remain in Mali.” Two months later, however, the French contingent reached its maximum strength of 6000 troops, to eventually return to a strength of 4500 ...