Paper short abstract:

This paper argues that ‘anti-French’ popular (re)actions should be read as initiatives that reformulate African liberation ideologies from the 1950s-1960s. These mobilizations, which sometimes promote authoritarian powers, have consequences on the French Development-Security nexus in West Africa.

Paper long abstract:

This paper argues that the effervescence of ‘anti-French’ mobilizations in the 2010s is not only the result of the various political and security crises faced by France-Africa relations in the context of the growing influence of non-French actors (Russia, Turkey, and China), but also of the long history of anti-imperialist movements located in the ‘Black Atlantic’ (Gilroy 1993) between Europe, Africa, and the Americas. It asserts that these mobilizations should be read as initiatives that reformulate African liberation ideologies from the 1950s-1960s. It posits that these movements, which sometimes rehabilitate ‘revolutionary’ authoritarian powers, have implications for the evolution of the French Development-Security nexus in West Africa.

This paper relies on empirical research conducted during 12 months on Pan-Africanist organizations based in France, consisting of 30 interviews, a study of numerical social networks, and an ethnography of these movements. It focuses on two associations called 'la Ligue de Défense Noire Africaine' (LDNA) and 'Unité, Dignité, Courage' (UDC), and shows how they renegotiate Pan-Africanism and Third-Worldism by advocating for a radical separation from France: they not only wish to end all French military interventions in West Africa, but also to depart from ‘democracy’ and ‘development’, considered to be exogenous and ill-suited models to African realities. It examines how their reformulation of anti-imperialist ideologies manifests through discourses that interpret the recent coups d’état in Mali, Guinea, and Burkina Faso as progress towards regaining African sovereignty, as well as through concrete relationships with West African ‘patriots’ that support geopolitical reconfigurations in favor of Russia.