What Is So Special about the European Union? EU–UN Cooperation in Crisis Management in Africa

Abstract

This article analyses the ways in which rapidly emerging narratives of EU–UN cooperation in military crisis management are rewriting and re-authorizing European practices of military intervention in Africa. By problematizing the underlying assumptions, this article points to the increasing significance of uncertainties about the location of contemporary political life, the location of ‘crisis management’, and thus to the diverse effects of a crisis management approach to African conflicts. Hence, this article problematizes and challenges a range of powerful normative claims about ‘EU crisis management’. The emerging narratives are practices of knowledge and space that shape EU–Africa relations and that create new spaces of intervention, thus establishing and enabling relations of authority and control. Last, the article discusses briefly how such practices worked in the case of EUFOR Tchad/RCA (European Forces in Chad and the Central African Republic).