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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]

This paper argues that European cooperation in the management of African crises is not inherently more legitimate than previous unilateral forms of intervention. Nonetheless, the French colonial tradition of military intervention and continued efforts to maintain French hegemony are not necessarily incompatible with a European capacity to manage African crises. The cases of the French interventions in Cote d'Ivoire and in Chad/Darfur will support this argument. These cases show that the new interventionism cannot escape the fact that these postcolonial African states are a product of the French colonial Republic. Functionally, France's historic links to such places have both constructed their current political crises and created the expectation that France (above everyone else) should take the lead role in intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]