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.

Chapter 2 begins by detailing how the escalation of violence in northern Mali in 2012 became a security concern for regional, continental, and international actors by focusing on the spatial semantics ‘Sahelistan’ and ‘territorial integrity’. From the basis of this somewhat shared spatial semantics, the potential intervening actors engaged each other in a struggle over who would be the most suitable based on different understandings of ‘subsidiarity’. In so doing, each tried to prove their capability to intervene, projecting their power through this concrete deployment to Mali within wider African military politics. After months of negotiations, the African-led International Support Mission to Mali (AFISMA) was deployed amidst plans for a re-hatting to the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA) in mid-2013. This foregrounds the story about the marginalization of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and later of the African Union from steering military deployment in the region. This experience for (West) African decision-makers having their Malian ‘neighbours’ saved by ‘strangers’ has impacted subsequent debates on who is responsible for security in the Sahel, who is seen as legitimate intervener, and who is best equipped to take military action.

Chapter 4 further explores the role of bureaucrats within the African Union Commission (AUC) and the influence of Algerian representatives on continental security policies. It opens by reconstructing the formation of the Nouakchott Process in 2013 that brought together eleven member states of the ‘Sahelo-Saharan Region’, from Senegal to Chad and Libya to Nigeria, in a political environment marked by long-standing distrust and suspicion that had already hampered previous attempts at security cooperation. Based on this, the chapter analyzes how the spatial semantic ‘Sahelo-Saharan Region’ allowed the initiators of the Nouakchott Process to create a ‘transregional’ space to overcome the spatial dissatisfaction with the African Standby Force (ASF) geography without undermining it. This allowed the AUC and Algerian representatives to regain influence over the conflict interventions in Mali and the Sahel to re-engage where they had felt sidelined after the French intervention and United Nations Mission’s take over. The chapter concludes with an examination of the proposed Nouakchott Process Intervention Force, which, while never deployed, reveals from its conception the growing desire for military-heavy, robust, counterterrorism engagement by African policymakers.