This book explores France’s African intervention policy and related legitimation strategies through the United Nations, the European Union, and various ad hoc multilateral frameworks. France’s enduring ability to project military power on the African continent and influence political events there has been central to its self-perception as a major power. However, since the end of the cold war, France’s paternalistic interference has been increasingly questioned, not least by African audiences. This has produced a gradual and somewhat reluctant turn to multilateralism on the part of French leaders. Drawing on in-depth case studies of recent French intervention policy, this edited volume critically assesses France’s efforts to reassure critics by securing multilateral endorsements; share burdens and liabilities through collective implementation; and re-affirm its status as a major power by spearheading complex missions. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Strategic Studies.
This book investigates France's 2013 military intervention in Mali and its lessons for America's fight against terrorist groups in Africa and worldwide. Its assessment of new anti-terrorist military strategy will be of use to those in the foreign policy and national security communities.
This book chronicles foreign political and military interventions in Africa from 1956 to 2010, helping readers understand the historical roots of Africa's problems.
The role of French security policy and cooperation in Africa has long been recognized as a critically important factor in African politics and international relations. The newest form of security cooperation, a trend which merges security and development and which is actively promoted by other major Western powers, adds to our understanding of this broader trend in African relations with the industrialized North. This book investigates whether French involvement in Africa is really in the interest of Africans, or whether French intervention continues to deny African political freedom and to sustain their current social, economic and political conditions. It illustrates how policies portrayed as promoting stability and development can in fact be factors of instability and reproductive mechanisms of systems of dependency, domination and subordination. Providing complex ideas in a clear and pointed manner, France and the New Imperialism is a sophisticated understanding of critical security studies.
France in Centrafrique explores the pre- and post-colonial history of the Republic of Central Africa as well as giving the reader a taste of the country's involvement in WWII itself. The main focus of this volume is on Central Africa's independence and the rise to power of Jean Bedel Bokassa including the Focard network and Françafrique connections, France's military links with RCA (defense agreements), the republic's post independence military, its politics and Bokassa's coup. It takes a staggering look at Central Africa under Bokassa's leadership and the ensuing break down in its relationship with France. Operation Baracuda was the natural culmination of that soured relationship and in this book de Cherisey examines "France's last colonial expedition", the planning of the operation, its players, a step-by-step breakdown and its outcome. To bring the reader up to speed with the RCA de Cherisey discusses the years after Bokassa, a new political rule, the effects on the army and the relationship with France all the way to Operation Almandin I, II and III. France's involvement in the RCA is deep-seated and ongoing. This book concludes with a look at Operation Boali, Bozizé's coup and the international fallout in terms of further intervention both from France and the EUFOR. Peter Baxter is an author, amateur historian and African field, mountain and heritage travel guide. Born in Kenya, Peter has lived and travelled over much of southern and central Africa. He was educated in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), leaving the country after independence for an extended bout of travel before returning in 1989. Since then he has guided in all the major mountain ranges south of the equator, helping develop the concept of sustainable travel, and the touring of battlefield and heritage sites in East Africa. Peter lives in the United States, working on the marketing of African heritage travel as well as a variety of book projects. His interests include British Imperial history in Africa and the East Africa campaign of the First World War in particular. He is married with three children.
Revealing the central yet intentionally obliterated role of Africa in the creation of modernity, Born in Blackness vitally reframes our understanding of world history. Traditional accounts of the making of the modern world afford a place of primacy to European history. Some credit the fifteenth-century Age of Discovery and the maritime connection it established between West and East; others the accidental unearthing of the “New World.” Still others point to the development of the scientific method, or the spread of Judeo-Christian beliefs; and so on, ad infinitum. The history of Africa, by contrast, has long been relegated to the remote outskirts of our global story. What if, instead, we put Africa and Africans at the very center of our thinking about the origins of modernity? In a sweeping narrative spanning more than six centuries, Howard W. French does just that, for Born in Blackness vitally reframes the story of medieval and emerging Africa, demonstrating how the economic ascendancy of Europe, the anchoring of democracy in the West, and the fulfillment of so-called Enlightenment ideals all grew out of Europe’s dehumanizing engagement with the “dark” continent. In fact, French reveals, the first impetus for the Age of Discovery was not—as we are so often told, even today—Europe’s yearning for ties with Asia, but rather its centuries-old desire to forge a trade in gold with legendarily rich Black societies sequestered away in the heart of West Africa. Creating a historical narrative that begins with the commencement of commercial relations between Portugal and Africa in the fifteenth century and ends with the onset of World War II, Born in Blackness interweaves precise historical detail with poignant, personal reportage. In so doing, it dramatically retrieves the lives of major African historical figures, from the unimaginably rich medieval emperors who traded with the Near East and beyond, to the Kongo sovereigns who heroically battled seventeenth-century European powers, to the ex-slaves who liberated Haitians from bondage and profoundly altered the course of American history. While French cogently demonstrates the centrality of Africa to the rise of the modern world, Born in Blackness becomes, at the same time, a far more significant narrative, one that reveals a long-concealed history of trivialization and, more often, elision in depictions of African history throughout the last five hundred years. As French shows, the achievements of sovereign African nations and their now-far-flung peoples have time and again been etiolated and deliberately erased from modern history. As the West ascended, their stories—siloed and piecemeal—were swept into secluded corners, thus setting the stage for the hagiographic “rise of the West” theories that have endured to this day. “Capacious and compelling” (Laurent Dubois), Born in Blackness is epic history on the grand scale. In the lofty tradition of bold, revisionist narratives, it reframes the story of gold and tobacco, sugar and cotton—and of the greatest “commodity” of them all, the twelve million people who were brought in chains from Africa to the “New World,” whose reclaimed lives shed a harsh light on our present world.
