Description
How do European interveners navigate the gap between their progressive self-image and increasing accusations of neocolonialism and military intervention failure in Africa? Through Kleinian psychoanalysis and Bion’s theory of containment, I examine the relations between European staff and their Malian and Nigerien recipients forged during the EU’s decade-long intervention in the Sahel conflict. Everyday relationships with recipients are crucial sites of meaning-making and recognition for EU staff, yet they are also repositories for unprocessed, evacuated persecutory anxieties about the intervention’s poor outcomes and accusations of neocolonialism. Drawing on 65 interviews with practitioners and ethnographic observation, I argue that European staff are caught in a cycle of failed attempts to process their anxieties about intervention failure. Through projective identification, European staff blame African recipients for not taking responsibility for the poor results of the intervention, and accuse French staff paternalistic and neocolonial behaviour. These projections allow staff to keep investing in their work while preserving their idealised self-representations as ‘good Europeans’ and disavowing colonial guilt and responsibility. As of yet, the EU’s missions and projects do not provide a container in which personnel can process the unbearable thought that their practices perpetuate the colonial histories the EU claims to have transcended.
