Fighting Terror in Mali: the Power of Narratives, Myths, and Culture on European Foreign Policy. A Discourse Analysis of European Narratives on Security and Defence in Mali from 2011 until 2021.
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2022-06-24
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en
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After nine years of military intervention, advisory missions, and building state capacity in Mali, Europeans are withdrawing from the country. The prudent observer will not be fooled by claims of success of the European strategy in the Sahel. It is a tragic fact that the Malian political system has been captured by a brutal junta that is waging war against its own population with the help of reckless Russian mercenaries. Europeans believed that the conflict in Mali was about fighting terrorism, and that counterterrorism operations would suffice to provide time for the Malian state to become strong enough to extend its reach to the most remote areas of the Sahel. Europeans were warned that the conflict was more complex, yet they persisted and they failed. What has prevented them from learning from their own experience on the ground and the analysis of experts? This paper builds on the ‘discursive turn’ in the study of strategic culture to describe and test a mechanism that allows to understand strategic culture as the result of a competition between epistemic communities. The reliance on the counterterrorism analysis is explained by the pervasiveness of narratives on the ‘war on terror’ that have been strategically deployed to resonate with existing political myths of European exceptionalism. These narratives successfully influenced the dominant discourse on grand strategy, and consequently, of a European strategic culture itself. But the
dominant discourse changed, which highlights the fluid nature of strategic culture, and offers the promise of an innovative research agenda.
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Faculteit der Managementwetenschappen