Omnibalancing and international interventions: How Chad’s president Déby benefitted from troop deployment

ABSTRACT

This article studies why authoritarian states participate in international interventions. Troop contributions of such states indicate the support of authoritarian leaders for a liberal-cosmopolitan order that entails the protection of human rights internationally, while they deny such rights to their own citizens. I focus on the decisions of Chad’s long-term president Idriss Déby Itno to take an active stance in various international interventions. The analysis builds on the theory of omnibalancing, which holds that authoritarian leaders balance external and internal threats to ensure their survival. I demonstrate how Déby used troop deployment as part of his omnibalancing strategy. It allowed him to stay in power until his death in 2021 and made Chad’s democratization unlikely. For Déby’s omnibalancing not only quelled the domestic opposition and silenced international critique against the authoritarian rule, but also contributed to the securitization of the state.

KEYWORDS:

• Troop contributions
• international interventions
• omnibalacing
• Chad
• authoritarian rule

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this article was presented at the September 2021 virtual convention of the German Political Science Association. The author thanks the participants of the panel “regional organizations and autocratic rule” for a fruitful discussion and in particular Sören Stapel for their helpful comments on the manuscript. The author is also grateful to Steven David, Helga Dickow, Hylke Dijkstra, Penny Harper, the research team “Intervention and Security” at the GIGA Institute in Hamburg, and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on earlier drafts of this article.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

The German Foundation for Peace Research [Deutsche Stiftung Friedensforschung] kindly supported the research for this article.

Notes on contributors

Martin Welz

Martin Welz is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Social Sciences at the University of Hamburg, Germany. His research focusses on international conflict management, international orders, as well as African history and politics. His work has been published in African Affairs, International Affairs, and International Peacekeeping amongst others. He is the author of Africa since decolonization: the history and politics of a diverse continent, published with Cambridge University Press in 2021.