Understanding the public response: a strategic narrative perspective on France’s Sahelian operations

ABSTRACT

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Strategic narratives
• France
• security
• Sahel
• military
• public opinion

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to Victoria Basham, Eloise Bertrand, David Clarke, colleagues at Loughborough University London and the journal's anonymous reviewers for their comments on an earlier draft. Gordon Cumming also wishes to thank the Collegium in Lyons for its support.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Coticchia and Cantanzaro (2020, p. 7–8) identify common definitions of these concepts.

2 A keyword in context search of the top 100 uses of “security” reveals 42 references to Mali, 22 to Europe and 36 to the “Security Council”.

3 Jentleson would explain this in terms of the “halo effect” (increased public tolerance arising out of a rapid military victory). Our Serval corpus contained 51 references to “elections” (keyword 102) and 27 to “democracy” (keyword 149).

4 All translations are by the authors.

5 A higher number (32) of the top 100 references to “security” in Table 1 now relate to Europe, even if there are still more references (44) to Sahelian security.

6 29 of the 55 references to “security” in Table 1 relate to Europe, with only 21 now pertaining to Sahelian security.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by The Leverhulme Trust [grant number RPG-2017-095].