Military Engagement of the US, France, and Germany in the Sahel. Towards liberal peace by post-modern intervention?

Abstract

The US, France and Germany have been militarily engaged in the Sahel zone for years. The US stepped up its activities after 9/11, France after the insurgency of Tuareg and Islamist groups in 2012 and Germany after the end of the French intervention, “Operation Serval”, in 2015. The initial focal point of engagement was Mali and then was extended to the Sahel region. The official rationale for this intervention is based on a mix of liberal peace arguments, such as protecting human rights, supporting democracy, furthering development and strengthening local ownership, and security-related arguments, such as the fight against terrorism, supporting regional stability and – the latest twist – preventing migration. The underlying rationale of these activities starts from the assumption of a strong security-development-nexus encapsulated in the formula “There is no development without security and no security without development”. Accordingly, a whole-of-government approach is needed to successfully cope with security challenges emanating from the Sahel. The military is only one actor amongst others and complements the activities of other state agencies. I look at these activities from a critical angle, stressing that the three countries embarked on a militarised approach framed with liberal peace arguments. Their core military activities oscillate between counter-insurgency (COIN), counter-terrorism (CT) and military capacitybuilding. These are US-terms for various modes of irregular warfare that may or may not be combined with regular warfare. I call this way of intervention “postmodern” because it is neither the classical modern way of warfare nor a mere unconventional one. In an ideal-typical framework, the main characteristics of this approach are a preference for indirect engagement (instead of direct), precise air strikes (instead of so-called “dumb bombs”), use of special operations forces (SOF) and local proxies on the ground (instead of the country’s own