Disentangling the security traffic jam in the Sahel: Constitutive effects of contemporary Interventionism

Abstract

This special section establishes the importance of redirecting the study of liberal interventionism towards a broader range of effects, beyond debates about intended and unintended consequences or success and failure. What have we gained from doing so? Directing the analytical gaze towards constitutive effects exposes the ways in which different types of intervention effects, as well as the relations between such effects, shape continuity and change in international interventions. This, we argue, can also help explain why, despite failure to suppress violence in the Sahel, interventions continue. Moreover, it offers an important perspective on the question of what interventions do produce-and how-if peace is a 'radical impossibility'.92 For example, the notion of constitutive effects may help explain how, at times, desired yet often unstated effects (e.g. self-understandings, security partnerships, the need to confirm to allies one's capacity to intervene)-rather than, first and foremost, the stated aim of achieving 'on the ground' objectives set out in mission mandates-may be crucial drivers for continuing (contributions to) interventions. While acknowledging that questions about which constitutive effects arise in each intervention theatre are context-dependent, we have suggested and exemplified three broad categories of effects. This is not an exhaustive list, but rather a starting-point for giving due attention to the importance of the diverse effects-A nd 'counter-effects'-that ongoing intervention practices produce. This framework also encourages further analysis of how these and other constitutive effects emerge in different intervention settings. Similarly, the approach presented here encourages the raising of questions about the constitutive capacities of different 'component parts' of contemporary interventions. Looking at how various effects are unpacked in the contributions to this special section, it becomes apparent that multiple elements contribute to 'intervention continuity'. First, security actors can, in important ways, perform and confirm their identity-for example, the EU as emerging security intervener-through intervention practices. Thus, as Sandor shows, the mutually constitutive relationship between performative intervention practices and intervening actors creates a certain logic of necessity and a perceived 'need' for interventions. Second, we see that the constitution of 'security partnerships' is vital to contributing states' sense of security (particularly in an uncertain world of shifting alliances). Yet these 'security partnerships' are fragile constructs, whose maintenance 'necessitates' continuous intervention contributions. This raises issues of continuity. To maintain existing security partnerships, or seek to constitute new ones, states may perceive a need to continue making contributions to one or more interventions in the Sahel. Critically, the focus of such partnerships risks being more about the security of the contributing state than about the security of state(s) being intervened upon. Third, considering how intervention rationales are not fixed prior to, but produced and revised during, ongoing interventions raises the question of when an intervention will cease if its rationale is under constant production/revision. Finally, similar issues of continuity emerge in Sandor's analysis of how rumours produce (and are constitutive of ) 'the conditions for continual international involvement'. The focus on multiple intervention effects also shows how several crucial disconnects cut across the relational, temporal and spatial dimensions. In different ways, contributions to this special section shed light on how-despite shared assumptions among interveners about synergy, coherence and collaboration-various disconnects are constituted during intervention practices in this crowded space. This includes a disconnect between grandiose political ambitions on the one hand and a meagre willingness to deploy, on the other; a disconnect within emerging intervention actors such as the EU;93 a disconnect between logics of necessary continuity and stated desires to withdraw or to limit future engagements. At present, paradoxically, these disconnects reveal an inbuilt tension within contemporary interventionism. As liberal ambitions take a back seat in the face of a growing number of non-liberal intervention actors, it becomes increasingly important for 'liberal interventionism' to achieve self-referential constitutive effects through ongoing intervention practices; yet this aim sits uneasily with a simultaneous intervention fatigue and desire to withdraw from long-term intervention engagements. Finally, calling attention to the temporal dimension of constitutive effects, this special section also enables and encourages the discovery of potentially escalating effects. In the Sahel, militarization has increased rapidly in the course of current interventions. Initially, as Tankel shows, the framing of military interventions as 'security partnerships' had a depoliticizing effect and blurred the boundaries of when and where the United States (and others) were at war, while the use of force nonetheless creeps in as interventions unfold. At the same time, in a trend that is significant for the emergence of various effects, intervening actors encounter radical resistance from local actors on the ground, who equally intensify their attempts to destroy what they see as foreign occupiers attempting to colonize a space that they desire to rule. Indeed, over time and as the intervention theatre has expanded, many analysts and journalists have referred to the Sahel as 'Sahelistan' or the 'French Afghanistan'.94 While such comparisons may be deficient in contextual analysis, the legacies of previous war experiences do, to a remarkable extent, come to shape incessantly recurring intervention rationales as well as the mindsets of individual soldiers deployed on the ground. As several of the contributions to this special section show, by adding a temporal dimension to analyses of effects emerging from contemporary interventions, knowledge effects of previous war experiences blend in with and produce 'more of the same', like the famous 'imitative rays' that Latour asks us to consider.95 That is, the escalating effects of interventions, while increasingly resisted by radical actors, in turn create a perceived need for more military force. And this need opens up possibilities for adding ever more new niche missions that, in turn, enable (re-)emerging security actors to enter the theatre to continue their performance as capable actors, while the situation on the ground increasingly resembles a 'descent into hell',96 and while the intervention space itself expand.