Description
This paper explores the extent to which Chad’s military interventions in the war on terror in the Sahel and the Lake Chad area contribute to the consolidation of the state. I am concerned about how grassroots understandings of these military interventions reinforce people’s attachment to the state, potentially entrenching its authority. In my prospective argument, I seek to argue that the military interventions provide people with the language to understand the agency of the state, therefore making the fractured Chadian state appears more consistent and coherent in the minds of its citizens. These perceptions are all the more important because they give my respondents the assurance that the Chadian state has the power it takes for a state to impose its will on other international relations actors such as the terror organisations. In the end, my argument challenges the failed state theory (Jackson, 1991) which was so far used to characterise the Chadian state as I argue that through its international actions the state becomes more legible by projecting itself in the mind of its own citizens.
