Peace and Security Interventions in Africa: A new Approach to Order-maintenance?

The last couple of decades have seen an upsurge of military interventions in Africa addressing issues threatening the global security agenda. Under the broad banner of the liberal peace, resilience and counter-human trafficking, these operations have aimed at strengthening states’ government and security apparatus. Though the continent has historically experienced different forms of military intervention, at least quantitatively, there is an increase both in the number of interventions and of actual deployments. Several questions stem from here: if problems of security and conflict in Africa tend to be linked to issues of development and state reform, why are these issues addressed by military means? Why is Africa the most militarily targeted continent? How do these intervention relate to practices of world ordering? Following recent literature on militarism (E.g. Stavrianakis and Selby 2013, Shaw 2005), the paper argues that there is a new kind of militarism that signals, firstly, that practices of power and order-maintenance continue to rely on violence both for deterrence and for the constitution of institutions of authority; and secondly, that North-South relations rely on the distribution of force both between and within states. The paper explores this argument by following Mahmood Mamdani, focusing on the notions of patterns, practices and decentralised despotism.