The introduction puts forward the argument that African military politics are essentially spatial. It provides the precondition to understanding how an African elite of presidents, diplomats, and bureaucrats from regional organizations has been ‘making room for war’ in the Sahel since 2012. We are urged here to move past conventional notions of social space as static and instead conceptualize it as relational and in flux. Space is (re-)created by actors as they shape and alter the relations amongst themselves. It is not a change in space, but a change of space. Based on an analysis of the literature debates on African military deployments, the introduction argues to foreground the politics surrounding these interventions over discussions about effectiveness. Actors negotiate who is ‘close’ or ‘distant’ to a security concern, who is a legitimate intervener, and who is included or excluded in a common military response. They do so by invoking naturalized narratives about space as the analysis shows of the many Sahel strategies or the comparison of the intervention in Mali to that in Afghanistan. From this departure point, the politics around African-led military deployments for the Sahel are analyzed throughout the book.

Chapter 1 provides the book’s theoretical bedrock and conceptual basis for a rereading of the techno-managerial policy world of the African Peace and Security Architecture (APSA) and an analysis of the African military politics that surround it. This is guided by a rethinking of space as relational, as well as the analysis of spatial semantics, observable structures of meaning-making in narratives that allow actors to shape social space. By way of the organigram as an artefact in the field of African peace and security, the chapter highlights the omnipresence of a representational understanding of space as well as its limits for grasping African military politics. Instead, a relational and processual ontology to understanding space is proposed, which allows us to conceptualize change and, consequentially, agency. Based on this reconceptualization of space, Döring draws on critical geopolitics as a tradition of thought that has allowed the observation of the shaping of space and highlighted the role of elites in doing so. These two conceptual moves are framed by an introduction to the spatiality of subsidiarity within APSA at the beginning of the chapter and by a discussion of the role of spatial semantics in African military politics at the end.