Anatomy of a Fall: Understanding France’s Reluctant Retreat from Central Sahel
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Building on the notion of geopolitical imaginaries, this paper delineates three distinct and successive periods in the French engagement with the Sahel: first, the (post)colonial era characterised by the Sahel’s unique and peripheral position within France’s ‘pré carré’; second, the War on Terror era, marked by the Sahel’s integration into a global ‘arc of crises’; and finally, the current shift towards prioritising competition among major powers. This article sheds light on the processes whereby geopolitical imaginaries informing foreign policy have been transformed and reshaped. The French retreat from the Sahel took place in a context where the limitations of French security architecture became evident and where Sahelian military juntas elaborated their own antagonistic, sovereigntist geopolitical imaginary. Amidst anxiety and uncertainties, France grappled with the tension between its stated ambition to build better relations and the self-perception of an exceptionalist role on the African continent.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it