‘Security — Development’ Nexus in French Academic Discourse: On France’s Policy in the Sahel

Against the backdrop of rising anti-French sentiments in the Sahel region, debates have intensified within both Russian and foreign scholars regarding the reasons for the apparent crisis, if not the failure, of the Fifth Republic’s African policy. At the same time, these discussions tend to ignore the concept of theso-called ‘security-development nexus’, which, meanwhile, was one of the key determinants shaping France’s approaches to the Sahel countries. An examination of the French experts’ understanding of this construct is particularly interesting because it reveals the specifics and principles of the conceptual-theoretical framework underlying France’s foreign policy toward African countries in general. The first section assesses the French public administration system on the African track and describes the institutional organization of national expertise on security and development issues in Africa, including identifying the affiliations of its most prominent representatives. The author notes that these think tanks and individual researchers are subject to French state authorities’ significant influence or even direct patronage. The second section examines the complex process of the adaptation of French research circles to the securitization of the international development agenda in the 2000s, as they were initially highly skeptical toward the discourse on ‘fragile’ states and the ‘nexus’ concept, borne of the Anglo-Saxon political thought. The third section analyzes the internalization and instrumentalization of the ‘nexus’ in France’s African policy and in French academic discourse against the backdrop of the escalating crisis in the Sahel region in the 2010s. The author emphasizes that the expert debates related to this process focused on solving two tasks: identifying the internal and external causes of the Sahel crisis and formulating practical recommendations for the French government on how to resolve it. The fourth section considers how French experts assess the outcomes of France’s military presence in the Sahel. In conclusion, the author argues that the crisis of the ‘Françafrique’ policy was caused by both objective reasons ‘on the ground’ (the lack of a coherent exit strategy from armed conflicts, the predominance of security considerations over the development agenda) and by hampered feedback between the state and expert circles.

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