Chapter 6 goes beyond a conclusion, calling more broadly for a serious appreciation of the political projects of African elites in critical geopolitics. This field has largely omitted African actors, discussing them, if at all, as being affected by the geopolitical ambitions of others such as China, United States, or France, rather than being considered as having active agency in shaping international politics. The chapter recaptures the African military politics that surrounded different proposals for military deployment for the Sahel as they were shaped by the foreign policy ambitions of South African president Jacob Zuma, Chadian president Idriss Déby Itno, the Algerian Commissioners for Peace and Security at the African Union Commission, as well as Nigerian politicians and bureaucrats from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). By drawing on the empirical insights of Chapters 1–5, Döring emphasizes the importance of studying spatial semantics in more general terms and how this provides a better understanding of changing paradigms for military action. This, as argued in the last part of the chapter, is indispensable in the current climate of re-emerging illiberal, nationalist, and authoritarian geopolitical narratives.

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.