FULLY BOOKED

Speaker: Katherine Pye, PhD candidate, Department of International Relations at LSE

Chair: Nina Wilén, Director of the Africa Programme at the Egmont Institute

Despite the EU’s decade-long intervention in the Sahel, the security situation has continued to deteriorate. Aware of the intervention’s poor results and grappling with the contradictions of the security sector reform programmes they implement, EU staff occupy a position of ambivalence: they cannot escape the tensions these programmes produce but they are simultaneously committed to making them work.

This presentation explores how EU interveners have collectively navigated this ambiguity in the Sahel. Examining staff sense-making processes can shed light on how interventions can be sustained on the everyday level despite their ineffectiveness, and on how interveners creatively respond to challenging cross-pressures.