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Civil Wars and Third-Party Interventions in Africa pp 131–157Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Operational Friction

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Abstract

This chapter sets out a series of structured, focused, comparative case studies to investigate the role of legibility, through shared language and executive interaction specifically, in the reduction of operational friction to result in successful military interventions. The cases analyzed are the British intervention in Sierra Leone in 2000, the French intervention in Mali in 2013, and the French intervention in Côte d’Ivoire in 2002 and 2011. All four of the cases achieved some level of success , and there are patterns apparent in all of them that may help to account for this outcome. The legacy of colonialism provided the interveners in all of the cases with resources that would not otherwise have been available to them throughout the course of their interventions. The analysis also suggested the possibility of that regional interactions outside of the intervention dyad may play a significant role in success. While the focus of the theorizing here has been on learning from the colonial legacy, the interventions in Sierra Leone and Mali suggest that the institutional memory of a military may be far shorter than that.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Education and Employment Research Center Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, Piscataway, NJ, USA

    Audrey Mattoon

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  1. Audrey Mattoon
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Mattoon, A. (2017). Operational Friction. In: Civil Wars and Third-Party Interventions in Africa . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-44983-8_6

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