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The French doctrine towards peace operations has, over the last two decades, reflected the ambivalence of France’s position, stretched between on the one hand a military culture that places the use of force at the centre of strategy and on the other hand multidimensional operations that by their nature integrate a large range of activities. As a consequence France has evolved as a ‘reluctant peacekeeper’: while it has been significantly involved in peace operations since the end of the Cold War, the military has never felt comfortable with the peacekeeping concept, seen as a dilution of their primary function of fighting wars. This tension has shaped both doctrinal development and operations. Twenty years after the French engagement in former Yugoslavia, lessons have been learnt, and policy-makers have become aware of the evolution of conflict management and the subsequent necessity to integrate the military dimension into a broader framework. Yet France’s policy is still shaped by a certain aversion towards the concept of long-term multinational peace operations, and a parallel preference for more focused and reactive operations. The merits of the use of force are central to these debates. While these policy preferences are responses to legitimate concerns about both the efficiency of foreign interventions and the soldier’s identity, they also raise questions as to their compatibility with the long term and multidimensional requirements of bringing sustainable peace in fragile states. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The concept of security sector reform (SSR) was first formulated by UK development actors. Since 2008, France has officially adopted an SSR strategy and promoted the concept at the European level during the country's 2008 EU Presidency. However, what appears on paper to resemble full support from French institutions is in fact more complex. If the anglophone roots of the policy initiative do not seemingly explain its lack of institutionalization in the French context, it would appear that the difficulty faced by the French administration in finding a whole-of-government agreement on what the content of SSR should be, does. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Through the example of the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), this article examines how intercultural skills are used by the French military in their daily life during a peacekeeping operation. As an essential part of professional military education and a component of military efficiency, cultural awareness is supposed to play a key role in fulfilling peacekeeping missions. The contention here is that there is a gap between the official discourse on cultural awareness and the way that the military experience their daily life and perceive multiculturalism during operations. Cultural diversity does not feature as a trump card, and national boundaries remain strong, in for example the compartmentalization of areas of operation and the restrictive UN and national rules of engagement. These limit the formal and informal contacts between contingents and with the population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To understand current conflict in the African Great Lakes region, it is necessary to consider the international response to the Rwandan civil war which preceded it, and from which it springs. Recognition of the failure of this response in its most explicit form - foreign and particularly French military intervention - does not preclude other forms of analysis, but does suggest that ethnicity alone is inadequate to explain the continuation of war. It will be argued in this article that France's Rwandan interventions, far from presenting a 'very positive balance sheet' as official French discourse still maintains, have been a primary cause of the prolongation and extension of conflict in the region; and the failure of these interventions, while discrediting France's role in particular, has also brought the validity of foreign military intervention in general (humanitarian or otherwise) into question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]