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This is a must-read article from @MichaelShurkin for anyone interested in the evolution of French thinking regarding counterinsurgency and military interventions. https://tnsr.org/2020/11/frances-war-in-the-sahel-and-the-evolution-of-counter-insurgency-doctrine/#_ftnref136
He cogently argues that France’s approach in the Sahel differs significantly from colonial conflicts. Similarities, in his view, are largely superficial. Namely, Barkhane (and other postcolonial interventions) aims to protect foreign states, rather than maintain French control.
I don’t disagree, but I think if you shift the lens of analysis a bit, the picture looks somewhat different. At the strategic level, French involvement in the Sahel is incomprehensible without reference to its colonial past.
Its “African vocation” (to put it nicely) is a byproduct of colonial-era mindsets which still exert a powerful influence on the French imagination. Intervening to protect regional states (or elites) from varied threats has been a consistent element of interventionism since 1960.
While understandings of threats to regional political orders have changed a lot over time, there remains a sort of neocolonial (for lack of a better word) project in which France still sees itself as an African power with a systemic responsibility for regional "stability."
Which is why they're not *simply* a foreign intervenor bolstering faltering/corrupt local regimes and whose presence is time-limited. They are, in many ways, there to stay, albeit not necessarily in the form of Barkhane.
Whether that gives them a long-term edge is up for debate, but it does imply some kind of continuity with earlier colonial conflicts, i.e. the French aren't going away, and they are invested in preventing the collapse of regional states to jihadists, even if they can't beat them.
