Anglo-French security cooperation in Africa since Saint-Malo

Given the burgeoning literature both on the European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP) and on Africa’s security challenges (see for example Howorth 2007, Franke 2009), it is surprising that there has been no attempt to explore in detail Anglo‑French security collaboration in Africa. This chapter begins by showing the lack of any meaningful UK-French cooperation from the colonial era to the immediate post Cold War period. It then demonstrates how, in the wake of the 1998 Saint-Malo summit, collaboration has begun to take place in terms of the institutionalisation of the security relationship, peacekeeping missions and military training activities in Africa. Finally, recent developments in Anglo-French security relations are explained by reference to neoclassical realism. This theory usefully goes beyond neorealism’s focus on recurrent patterns of interstate interactions in the international system by introducing as variables in the making of foreign policy both policy-makers’ perceptions of the state’s relative material power and the degree of state autonomy.