French military operations in Africa: Reluctant multilateralism

ABSTRACT

After the end of the Cold War, Paris’s traditional, paternalistic interference in Francophone Africa became increasingly questioned. Partly in response to that, over the last two-and-a-half decades, France’s Africa policy has emphasised multilateral cooperation and local capacity building through the United Nations, the European Union, and various ad hoc multilateral frameworks. This special issue aims to unpack and assess France’s efforts to (a) re-legitimise its military presence on the African continent by securing political endorsements from multilateral bodies; (b) share burdens and liabilities through greater reliance on collective implementation; and (c) re-affirm its own status as a leading power by often spearheading collective military missions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ For useful overviews, see French Ministry of Defence, ‘50 Ans d’Opex en Afrique, 1964–2014’, Cahier du RETEX (Paris 2014); and Philippe Chapleau and Jean-Marc Marill, Dictionnaire des opérations extérieures de l’armée française: De 1963 à nos jours (Paris: Nouveau Monde 2018).

² Quoted in Jean-François Bayart, ‘“Bis repetita”: La politique africaine de François Mitterrand’, in Samy Cohen (ed.), Mitterrand et la sortie de la guerre froide (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France 1998), 275.

³ Thierry Tardy, ‘France: The Unlikely Return to UN Peacekeeping’, International Peacekeeping 23/5 (2016), 610–29.

⁴ French Ministry of Defence, Les forces françaises prépositionnées (Paris 2016), 6, available at: https://www.defense.gouv.fr/operations/prepositionnees/mission-des-forces-prepositionnees/.

⁵ Robert O. Keohane, ‘Multilateralism: An Agenda for Research’, International Journal 45/4 (1990), 731.

⁶ John Gerard Ruggie, ‘Multilateralism: The Anatomy of an Institution’, International Organization 46/3 (1992), 561–98. See also Martha Finnemore, The Purpose of Intervention: Changing Beliefs about the Use of Force (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 2003), 80–1; and Stefano Recchia, Reassuring the Reluctant Warriors: US Civil-Military Relations and Multilateral Intervention (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 2015), 10–11.

⁷ For useful discussions of multilateral operations in Mali and the CAR, see, respectively, Paul D. Williams and Arthur Boutellis, ‘Partnership Peacekeeping: Challenges and Opportunities in the United Nations–African Union Relationship’, African Affairs, 113/451 (2014), 254–78; and Martin Welz, ‘Multi-actor Peace Operations and Inter-organizational Relations: Insights from the Central African Republic’, International Peacekeeping 23/4 (2016), 568–91. On France’s national operations in both countries, see Benedikt Erforth, Contemporary French Security Policy in Africa: On Ideas and Wars (London: Palgrave 2020).

⁸ In this sense, progress over the last decade has been sluggish and far from linear. See also Tony Chafer, ‘Franco-African Relations: No Longer So Exceptional?’ African Affairs 101/404 (2002), 343–63; and on French defence policy more generally, Alice Pannier and Olivier Schmitt, ‘To Fight another Day: France between the Fight against Terrorism and Future Warfare’, International Affairs 95/4 (2019), 897–916.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Stefano Recchia

Stefano Recchia (PhD, Columbia University) holds the John G. Tower distinguished chair in international politics and national security as an associate professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, TX. He is the author of Reassuring the Reluctant Warriors: US Civil-Military Relations and Multilateral Intervention (Cornell UP 2015). Further information about his research is available at www.stefanorecchia.net.

Thierry Tardy

Thierry Tardy (PhD) is the Director of the Research Division at the NATO Defence College in Rome. Previously he held senior research positions at the EU Institute for Security Studies in Paris and at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy. He has taught at Sciences Po Paris, La Sorbonne, the Graduate Institute in Geneva and the College of Europe in Bruges.