The introduction puts forward the argument that African military politics are essentially spatial. It provides the precondition to understanding how an African elite of presidents, diplomats, and bureaucrats from regional organizations has been ‘making room for war’ in the Sahel since 2012. We are urged here to move past conventional notions of social space as static and instead conceptualize it as relational and in flux. Space is (re-)created by actors as they shape and alter the relations amongst themselves. It is not a change in space, but a change of space. Based on an analysis of the literature debates on African military deployments, the introduction argues to foreground the politics surrounding these interventions over discussions about effectiveness. Actors negotiate who is ‘close’ or ‘distant’ to a security concern, who is a legitimate intervener, and who is included or excluded in a common military response. They do so by invoking naturalized narratives about space as the analysis shows of the many Sahel strategies or the comparison of the intervention in Mali to that in Afghanistan. From this departure point, the politics around African-led military deployments for the Sahel are analyzed throughout the book.

The main aim of this chapter is to give readers an overview of the evolution of African peacekeeping over time, delineating two somewhat distinct histories of the phenomenon. The chapter first examines the orthodox version of the evolution of African peacekeeping. Here, the focus is on the change from the OAU’s principle of non-intervention to the African Union’s notion of non-indifference. The authors trace this normative shift to the period after the Rwandan genocide, and to the broader security concept including the notion of human security. In line with this development, the chapter gives a brief overview of how the African Peace and Security Architecture represent this normative change in its structure and principles. In addition the chapter underlines the longer (pre-)history of African peacekeeping and the links that can be drawn between today’s peacekeeping, the creation of colonial police forces and armies in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and European colonial powers’ deployment of African troops for regional 'pacification' military campaigns. The case of Ghana – and the Ghanaian Police Force – is explored as a case study in developing this argument.

The term conflict management stands for a wide array of activities undertaken to prevent violent conflicts, to manage and end them once broken out, as well as to build peace and to avoid a recurrence of violence. Such activities include mediation between warring factions, military and civilian peacekeeping operations to oversee truces or peace agreements, peace enforcement, and post-conflict reconstruction, which comprises initiatives for state-building and socio-economic development amongst others. This chapter scrutinizes these activities and identifies factors that lead to peace. Itconcentrates on mediation and power-sharing as means to make peace, on military and civilian operations of international organizations as means to keep peace, as well as on the accommodation of spoilers, the design of peace operations, and transitional justice as means to build peace.