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.

Chapter 1 provides the book’s theoretical bedrock and conceptual basis for a rereading of the techno-managerial policy world of the African Peace and Security Architecture (APSA) and an analysis of the African military politics that surround it. This is guided by a rethinking of space as relational, as well as the analysis of spatial semantics, observable structures of meaning-making in narratives that allow actors to shape social space. By way of the organigram as an artefact in the field of African peace and security, the chapter highlights the omnipresence of a representational understanding of space as well as its limits for grasping African military politics. Instead, a relational and processual ontology to understanding space is proposed, which allows us to conceptualize change and, consequentially, agency. Based on this reconceptualization of space, Döring draws on critical geopolitics as a tradition of thought that has allowed the observation of the shaping of space and highlighted the role of elites in doing so. These two conceptual moves are framed by an introduction to the spatiality of subsidiarity within APSA at the beginning of the chapter and by a discussion of the role of spatial semantics in African military politics at the end.