5 - African Military Coalitions and the ‘Core Countries’ in the Sahel

Summary

Chapter 5 examines the genesis of the regional organization G5 Sahel and its Joint Force composed of Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger. It looks at a group of African actors that set up the organization with extraordinary support by French and other European partners in 2014. Following the discussion on the entanglement of spatial semantics with the issue of distrust and suspicion in politics from Chapter 4, this chapter begins with an analysis of the different narratives about the true ‘origin’ of the G5 Sahel, exploring narratives of French lobbying and different African foreign policy objectives. This links directly to questions of ownership and to how and why this regional organization emerged based on the idea of ‘core countries of the Sahel’, which excluded Algeria and Nigeria. Chapter 5 addresses these questions and shows how different spatial semantics were used in the formation of the G5 Sahel and its Joint Force to draw up a new region, to re-regionalize West African political space, to reposition the involved actors in the best possible way to gain influence on the security and military responses to the escalating armed violence in Mali and neighbouring countries.