Description
What explains international interveners' persistent attachment to liberal intervention policies that have consistently failed to stabilise conflicts? This paper argues that the Lacanian concepts of fantasy and object cause of desire hold significant interpretive value. Through 65 interviews and an analysis of the meaning-making narratives of EU personnel working on Europe's decade-long intervention in the West African Sahel, this paper argues that staff are attached to the desired object of 'the successful intervention' and the fantasy that (European) intervention can and will one day stabilise conflict somewhere, given the right conditions. EU staff in the Sahel pursue this fantasy despite being confronted daily with the failure of their programmes and escalating conflict, as well the dearth of ‘success stories’ in interventions globally – from Afghanistan to Somalia and DRC. To sustain their fantasy, EU staff invest significant energy into ‘learning lessons’ from the Sahel to improve future interventions. This investment enables the resilience of liberal intervention; through constant focus on ‘what went wrong’ personnel are able to go on solving the puzzle of how to make interventions effective, and can ignore or suppress the question of ‘why is European intervention beneficial at all?’ The lack of concrete benchmarks for judging when an intervention has failed creates ambiguity that keeps the fantasy alive; if staff can keep plausibly denying failure, they can keep intervening in the hope of one day attaining the successful intervention. Using psychoanalysis, this article provides a novel insight on how liberal intervention ideology is sustained through the everyday meaning making narratives of staff members.
