It appears US intel suffers from ideologically-distorted interpretive lenses. Wagner is not a main driver of African instability. Its presence is driven by local domestic politics, and its ability to control those politics is limited. 1/ washingtonpost.com/world/2023/04/… Eg, Wagner benefits from anger at French policies. This anger is not a product of Russian disinformation, but of French policies! Yes, Russian disinformation and self-interested rhetoric by politicians exacerbates this, but it's not created out of thin air. 2/

Sylla makes some very good points here, but there is a missing dimension: Neocolonialism is far more of a social and economic fact in the neocolony than the metropole and it persists in that sense to this day. 1/

https://twitter.com/nssylla/status/1577232059038584832

But for France, since 1960 --and arguably more so today--the main drivers of French neocolonialsm have been far more geopolitics, prestige, ideology, military pressure groups, and closely-allied African leaders than "pure" economic interests.

In light of Macron's decision to transform Barkhane into something else, I'm re-upping this piece I wrote way back in 2015 on why most military interventions aimed at stabilization usually fail. Whatever Barkhane turns into, it's unlikely to do better. 1/ opendemocracy.net/en/why-militar… The 1st reason is that--as in previous interventions and like other intervenors--French policymakers misunderstand or ignore a lot of the state-society dynamics at work in driving jihadist insurgencies. They view conflict through the "grand narrative" of a war on terrorism. 2/

Apropos of nothing, here's an order from Paris to the commander of French forces in Chad not to intervene to stop a coup d'état against François/N'Garta Tombalbaye in April 1975. There has long been speculation about the French role in the coup. From what I have gathered from French records, first-hand accounts, and American sources, the French may have known something was brewing in the day or two preceding the coup, but were not involved. Tombalbaye had threatened to purge the security services and that was enough.

The old “colonial taxes” trope is making the rounds again regarding the CFA franc and Franco-African relations. It’s a misguided, and perhaps even counterproductive way to understand France’s peculiar role in postcolonial Africa. 1/ First, since 1960 the Franco-African relationship has been the most clearly neocolonial of all postcolonial relations b/t former African colonies and colonizers. French preferences for authoritarian regimes and single-party states has had destructive long-term effects. 2/