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"African Peacekeeping" by Jonathan Fisher and Nina Wilén is a comprehensive book that explores the impact of African involvement in peacekeeping on the politics of the continent. The authors avoid the typical analysis of why African states contribute troops to peacekeeping operations and instead focus on how peacekeeping is intertwined with other political struggles and agendas. The book covers topics such as the historical evolution of peacekeeping practice, the relationship between peacekeeping and political regimes, international relationships, national and regional identity, and post-conflict societies. While the book has some limitations, it provides a convincing and accessible study of the history and politics of African peacekeeping, emphasizing the importance of understanding the political formations and power structures that peacekeeping enables. [Extracted from the article]

Since 2013, the multiplication of regional and international strategies and actions directed at stabilizing Mali and the Sahel, and at countering and preventing violent extremism, has not improved the situation there and, arguably, some of it has made it worse. This article analyses the type of political order and regional governance that has been and is being built after almost a decade of international interventions in the West African Sahel. It is an effort at theorizing and making sense of what is considered here to be a permanent state of intervention in the Sahel that has evolved into a form of counterinsurgency governance—a concept being proposed to point to the influence and the infusion of counterinsurgency principles into philosophies of governance. This article argues that counterinsurgency governance insists on a set of power relations and configurations that seeks to impose limits, parameters and boundaries to the purpose of and the form that Sahelian states, governments and governance ought to take. As such, counterinsurgency governance is simultaneously a mode of governance and a web of political practices and contestation whose mechanisms have failed at fully implementing its principles in the Sahel. Its fallback is the emergence of a regional strategy to manage and establish limits to Sahelian political possibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Special Issue emphasises how power and power relations involved in establishing limits and boundaries to define, categorise and understand the world through comparison are intimately tied to conflict and intervention practices and dynamics. Indeed, when pundits, practitioners, academics and even conflict actors compare settings of armed conflict and intervention, they are participating in an inherently political move. The most off-handed of comments connect to assemblages that enable the production of categories and concepts from which it becomes difficult to think differently. Our comparisons perform worlds of armed conflict, and international interventions more often than not reflect those performances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comparison is a method that cannot avoid that its concepts are approximations made for specific audiences or purposes. Deployed to compare armed conflicts, it naturalises the state as the central unit of analysis and the intervention as the external context. This article proposes a strategy that reveals the colonial legacies that form or perform the units of analysis. The possibility of comparing Côte d'Ivoire and Mali appears only when one considers a prior comparison: between Francophone Africa and other 'worlds'. The construction of a French privileged sphere of intervention is inextricably tied to establishing a privileged sphere of comparison. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on purposes of United Nations (UN) peacekeeping that will always reflect international power politics. It mentions end of the Cold War first expanded the limits of UN peacekeeping, leading to new typologies of peace operations that blended and blurred the distinction between warfighting and UN peacekeeping. It also mentions UN peacekeeping in the age of the global war on terror is enabling perpetual war by providing a cover for the French-led counter-terrorist operations.

The articles of this Special Issue show how theoretical perspectives, normative frames, discursive strategies and conceptual issues shape, and are shaped by, intervention practices and the dynamics of peace and security in West Africa. As they construe and construct understandings of West African conflicts, they impact and justify conflict management practices. Put another way, how one defines the region called West Africa is not disassociated from one’s understanding of peace and security. The concepts are mutually constitutive. The increasing significance awarded to ‘radicalisation’ and ‘terrorism’ said to be coming from the Sahel suggests how practices of security do not simply respond to ‘threats’ somehow, somewhere, in ‘West Africa’. As the focus on international intervention moves north toward the Sahel, it transforms the meaning and formation of West African states and the West African region as it connects them to the extra-regional dynamics from the ‘Sahel’ and ‘North Africa’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the effects of UN peacekeeping and international counterterrorism operations upon the possibilities of peace in Mali. Following the January 2013 French operation Serval, the international intervention was divided between two military missions: UN peacekeeping in Mali and French-led counterterrorism. The article explores what it means to distinguish between peacekeeping and counterterrorism for international conflict management and Malian conflict resolution dynamics. It is argued that the binaries of war and peace, and of intervention and sovereignty, are no longer opposites, but blurred into an emerging ‘new normal’ of permanent military intervention. The construction of a regional counterterrorism governance or militarisation is shown to circumvent the fundamental questions about Malian peace, state sovereignty, and nationhood. The article points to how the international ‘division of labour’ between peacekeeping and counterterrorism defines the possibilities of peace in Mali in relation to the perceived necessities of the ‘global war on terror’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

On 11 January 2013, French president François Hollande justified a military intervention in Mali on the basis of the possible collapse of the Malian state, which faced an armed rebellion in the north of the country. Thus, the war was authorized and explained by the inability of the Malian government to respond to the threat. However, explanations and analyses that focus on security hide more than they reveal, including the ontological aims of the war and its identity stakes. To uncover these aspects, this article articulates the interaction between, on the one hand, the deployment of international violence, and, on the other, the construction of the state and the political imagination in Mali. This article concludes that peace in Mali was sought through the militarization of democratic governance, effectively reinforcing the prewar governance model. Unlike analyses focused on security, this article demonstrates that the boundaries and limits of the Malian conflict are not only territorial but also ideological and identity-based. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Comparisons of peacebuilding with historic practices of imperialism are common, but these comparisons have sustained a hegemonic antagonism between humanitarian and imperialist interpretations of international peace intervention. This article argues that this common framing externalises the problem of intervention, romanticises local resistance, and forecloses to investigation the articulation between militarised peace practices and transnational capitalist relations. To do so, the article analyses the case of Francophone Africa, thus providing a context that has been left unexplored in peacebuilding debates. By bringing back in the historicity of particular Franco-African imperial experiences into peacebuilding research, the article reveals the militarisation of politics, transnational elite networks, and the dominant intellectual predispositions that work to reproduce the legitimacy of hegemonic practices of ‘peace’ interventionism. In the last section, the article analyses the debates over the UN-French 2011 intervention in Côte d'Ivoire to reveal the connections between the ethics of humanitarian interventions and the political economy of imperialism. The article concludes that the imperial legacy of peacebuilding is found in old capabilities, new organising logics, and specific practices and power relations and that to focus on the humanitarian-imperialist antagonism caricatures the relationships between ‘local’ and ‘international’ actors. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses the theme of the issue, regional dynamics of peace and security in West Africa.

Conflicts are increasingly analysed as exhibiting a stealth complexity in which triggers and consequences are intricately linked to climate, environmental degradation and the struggle to control a finite pool of natural resources. The climate crisis is a multifaceted reality and, against this background, many pressing priorities compete with each other. The disruptive effect of climate variability and change on food systems is particularly acute and constitutes a direct and tangible threat to livelihoods globally. The objective of this paper is to demonstrate and discuss the importance of food systems under a climate crisis in exacerbating conflicts in the Sahelian region and propose interventions beyond and complementary to the usual military and security solutions. We demonstrate for the Sahel that (i) climate hazards are frequent and exposure to climate variability is high, (ii) hotspots of high climate variability and conflict exist, and (iii) impact pathways by which climate exacerbates food systems that can lead to conflicts are documented in the literature. While these three findings suggest clear links between conflict and climate, we find that (iv) current peace indices do not include climate and food systems indicators and therefore provide an uncomplete picture, and (v) food systems programming for climate adaptation has so far not explicitly considered peace and security outcomes. Furthermore, we propose that food systems programming that truly tackles the climate crisis should take more explicit account of peace and security outcomes in conflict-affected areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]