French Military Operations in Postcolonial Africa

Whether under a French, UN or EU flag, the French army has intervened more than 50 times in Africa in the last 60 years. Built with sources provided by the French army, these visualisations show the frequency of the French military interventions in its former colonial empire and sometimes beyond.

Explore Vincent Hirribaren’s personal website, where he explain the results of his research in African HistoryDigital Humanities and the History of the Basque Country.

 

Rethinking the time and space of resilience beyond the West: an example of the post-colonial border

Dieunedort Wandji

Critical resilience thinking is excessively fixated on resilience as participating in a neoliberal rationality of governance, while being itself shackled to the restrictive assumptions of crisis-oriented and disaster-based understandings of resilient systems. This paper contributes to the literature on the necessity to expand epistemological approaches to resilience thinking. It suggests that, as a silent disruption, the postcolonial border offers an insight into the overlooked complex materiality of resilience. The advocated notion of silent disruption is supported by an empirical examination of the African postcolonial border as a site of contested practices. The focus on disruptions rather than resilient practices weakens the theoretical foundations of the plurality claim advanced within critical resilience scholarship. The paper mainly contends that, by localising and politicising ‘disruption’ from an empirical perspective, we broaden out the concept of resilience to accommodate effective plurality as entangled in the interstice between the historical, the global and the national.

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