Abstract
What does it take to belong to a region and exert power over it? The scholarship on regional powers has elaborated sophisticated indicators to establish nuances of power, but the depiction of the region has remained vague. Most approaches are characterised by a narrow territorial interpretation that does not properly take into account power wielded by geographically distant actors. Using the case of France in Central Africa this article argues that a distant state can a) hold a dominant share of military, economic and soft power, b) use this power for hegemonic behaviour and c) be recognised as a leader in the region by both internal and external actors. The main specificity of distant actors as regional powers is the greater necessity for a legitimising narrative. France tackles this hurdle with the help of regional organisations that reproduce imperial structures. By holding the informal status of a quasi-member in regional governance structures, France participates in region-building processes from the inside rather than the outside.
Highlights
In early 2019, a convoy of 50 pick-ups from the Chadian rebel group UFR crossed the border from Libya to Chad. 900 kms farther in the capital N’djamena, the President of Chad Idriss Déby feared that this move could lead to an insurgency endangering his 30-year authoritarian rule
The scholarship on regional powers is caught in a constraining bias of embracing pregiven geographic containers and following a narrow territorial interpretation that is a priori not warranted by its own conceptual definitions
The first research question whether France constitutes a regional power in Central Africa can be answered affirmatively: France fulfils all three defining criteria of regional power (Womack 2016; Burges, 2015): it is in a dominant position in the region, actively seeks to maintain its centrality and has generated consensual followership
Summary
In early 2019, a convoy of 50 pick-ups from the Chadian rebel group UFR crossed the border from Libya to Chad. 900 kms farther in the capital N’djamena, the President of Chad Idriss Déby feared that this move could lead to an insurgency endangering his 30-year authoritarian rule. Chadian air force to curtail the rebels, Déby required external assistance. His first port of call for assistance was neither Nigeria—the military power within the neighbourhood—nor one of the African regional organisations. The present article challenges this perspective and unpacks the division between outsiders and insiders in the distribution of regional power shares. It asks whether and how a state can act as a regional power outside of its vicinity. Considerably less attention has been devoted to conceptualising the region of a regional power Scholars such as Østerud (1992) or Destradi (2010) refer to geographic location as an essential part of the definition of regional power. While regions have often been treated as containers to establish the power distribution, there is acknowledgement of the overlap and entanglement of different regional orders (Lake and Morgan 2010)
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