Subjectivity and ideology in international intervention: the meaning-making of EU staff in the Sahel

Why do European intervention staff persistently invest in the promise of capacity building programmes despite witnessing their overwhelming failure to produce their desired effects around the world? Combining a Lacanian psychoanalytic theoretical framework with an ethnographic focus on everyday meaning-making practices, this thesis draws on 65 long-form interviews, participant observation in Mali and Brussels and extensive online archival material. This thesis critiques existing Foucauldian and institutionalist accounts to argue that the continuity of failed interventions is made possible on the ground level by staff who are actively invested in them but also confront the myriad contradictions of these policies in their daily work. This thesis uncovers the everyday affective and ideological investments staff make in intervening, through an examination of the EU’s decade-long engagement in Mali and Niger. First, I demonstrate that staff are attached to an identity as expert ‘Europeans supposed to know’ – based on a disavowed but enduring colonial hierarchy – while also grappling with the limits of European expertise in West Africa. Second, I analyse the collective lesson learning exercises that take place after each failed intervention and how the desired object of the successful intervention keeps staff invested but is always just out of reach. Third, I examine EU staff’s fantasised relationship with the African recipients of assistance, who play a dual role both as objects of blame for the poor results of the intervention and whose fantasised gaze and recognition European interveners desire and enjoy. EU staff disavow accusations of neocolonialism, blaming French involvement for spoiling their otherwise meaningful relations with recipients. These findings have important implications for understanding intervention continuity and repetition despite failure, but also contribute to theory on questions of identity, desire, epistemic authority and postcolonial anxiety in the everyday practice of European foreign policy, particularly in Africa.