The article is devoted to the largest French foreign military operation “Barkhan” in the Sahara-Sahel region of Africa aimed at countering a terrorist threat and maintaining peace on the continent. The authors give a comprehensive analysis of the French armed forces strategy in this theater of operations. Special attention is paid to the reasons for France’s initial success as well as the consequences of completing the mission and the withdrawal of the contingent after 8 years of anti-terrorist activity in the long term for both African countries and Paris itself. It is concluded that the fruitlessly completed external operations of the Fifth Republic are the result of not just tactical mistakes, but the crisis of its defense and national security strategy, under which military cooperation with African states is still based on the colonial period approach. The methodological basis of the study is a systematic approach implying a comprehensive study of the Fifth Republic strategy to combat terrorism in the Sahel, including its evolution, implementation mechanisms as well
as institutional and legal foundations. In addition, the authors applied a set of general scientific methods, in particular: a concrete historical method for a detailed description of the French military operations «Serval» and “Barkhan” dynamics in the selected time period and a comparative analysis method of chosen official and public sources. Using a forecasting method, the authors put forward an assumption about the security situation development in the region after official completing “Barkhan” and redeploying the Fifth Republic military contingent to neighboring countries.
For citation: Smirnova O.A, Shpigovskaya M.V. Counter-terrorism activity of France in the Sahel Region, Ivanovo State University Bulletin, Series: Humanities, 2024, iss. 1, pp. 97—105.