At the beginning of May 2026, a summit entitled “Africa forward”, organized for the first time in an English-speaking country, Kenya, brought together 35 heads of state and government from across the continent as well as representatives of civil societies and large French and African groups. It was mainly about investments and business.
France, contested or even expelled from some of its former possessions and weakened politically, seeks to maintain its economic presence on the continent, including in English-speaking countries. A movement of economic redeployment has already been started by many other countries: China, Turkey, India, the Gulf countries, Spain, Germany and Italy.
The announcement in November 2022 of the end of the French operation Barkhane in the Sahel has been widely interpreted as the closure of a strategic cycle opened at the beginning of the 2000s, marked by the centrality of external counter-terrorism, stabilization and crisis management operations. Barkhane was the successor of On the edgewith an extensive regional footprint. Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, Chad, Mauritania. The Sahel which, over the years, has ceased to be just a theater of the fight against terrorism to become a terrain of rivalries between powers, where Russia, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates are particularly active. Information warfare is generally highlighted as the weak link in Operation Barkane during which France was imposed adverse narratives giving the image of an intrusive and ineffective country, questioning its legitimacy. And today, the temptation is great in the French public debate to reduce Barkhane to a failure to be forgotten.
For this fifth broadcast in partnership with INALCO, the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations and its DECRIPT program focusing on the transformations of the international system and the political and institutional effects of these civilizational stories which have emerged on the world stage, our guests:
- Raphaëlle Chevrillon-Guibert, researcher in political science at IRD, Institute of Research for Development, and member of the PRODIG laboratory
- Marc-Antoine Pérouse de Montclos, research director at the Institute of Research for Development. Co-director of the Afrique(s) collection at FMSH editions, Maison des Sciences de l’Homme Foundation.
/2026/05/22/6a1041b662b0e400907174.jpg "\"A bad calculation\" : NGOs denounce the drastic drop in international aid and its immediate consequences")
