Just spoke with a friend yesterday whose sibling is in the army awaiting a three week deployment out to Africa. I mentioned that it seemed to be horrifically inefficient to send personnel across the globe for such a short stint. My friend noted that they are on high alert the entire time with loaded weapons in the event of an overrun of the base and of course going off base is out of the question.
I dunno what we’re doing out there but it seems hearts and minds aren’t one of the priorities,
It's not black and white, but I think the French have reduced their attempts to control their old colonies in Africa - and are spending much less money there. I'm not sure it makes sense to see the coups across the Sahel as a response to rampant neocolonialism. Given that a lot of the French money went, director or indirectly, to senior politicians and generals in these countries, they would seem more likely to be (at least in part) a response to neocolonialism's decline.
regarding the dichotomy of populism vs technocracy, chris bickerton is extremely insightful to read on this and helped me a lot to unscramble my mind. his basic shtick is that while the older binary of left and right were actually antithetical, populism and technocracy are more similar than they appear and can even go together, al la macron, or the handling of covid for that matter (hence the title of his book, technopopulism). the basic similarity is that both technocracy as well as populism negate plurality, and presume the population to be a monolithic block. but this is getting a little long...
Just spoke with a friend yesterday whose sibling is in the army awaiting a three week deployment out to Africa. I mentioned that it seemed to be horrifically inefficient to send personnel across the globe for such a short stint. My friend noted that they are on high alert the entire time with loaded weapons in the event of an overrun of the base and of course going off base is out of the question.
I dunno what we’re doing out there but it seems hearts and minds aren’t one of the priorities,
It's not black and white, but I think the French have reduced their attempts to control their old colonies in Africa - and are spending much less money there. I'm not sure it makes sense to see the coups across the Sahel as a response to rampant neocolonialism. Given that a lot of the French money went, director or indirectly, to senior politicians and generals in these countries, they would seem more likely to be (at least in part) a response to neocolonialism's decline.
regarding the dichotomy of populism vs technocracy, chris bickerton is extremely insightful to read on this and helped me a lot to unscramble my mind. his basic shtick is that while the older binary of left and right were actually antithetical, populism and technocracy are more similar than they appear and can even go together, al la macron, or the handling of covid for that matter (hence the title of his book, technopopulism). the basic similarity is that both technocracy as well as populism negate plurality, and presume the population to be a monolithic block. but this is getting a little long...