On the train from Stuttgart, I worried about how my interviews at the US Africa Command (AFRICOM) had gone. It was not that I had not gotten a lot of material. I had. But it was not the kind of material I was looking for. The phenomenon I thought my PhD research was going to analyse— shifts in US military strategy and tactics toward populationcentric interventions in Africa— was not showing up. My reading of publicly available policy documents and reports about AFRICOM, created in 2007, suggested that it was designed to be a cutting-edge ‘new kind of command’ tailored to preventing ‘new’ security threats emerging in so-called underdeveloped contexts. AFRICOM is the newest of the US military's six geographic combatant commands, which have authority over military planning and operations in their defined ‘areas of responsibility’. Prior to 2007, most of the African continent fell in the European Command's area of responsibility. The creation of a separate Africa Command was widely assumed to signal a more interventionist US foreign policy on the continent.

For my part, I saw AFRICOM as a case to research how this ‘new kind of command’ was reshaping how traditional security actors like the military were engaging with ‘non-traditional’ security issues and environments. This could be, I anticipated, a useful contribution to a growing literature in my field of International Relations on the ways in which conditions of ‘underdevelopment’ were being targeted with various kinds of security interventions in the context of the ‘Global War on Terror’. My interviews, though, were making it clear that these discourses about a new kind of military command had limited correspondence with AFRICOM's actual strategy and practice, which seemed to have a much narrower and seemingly more conventional focus on the military's capacity to contain (rather than prevent) conflict and other threats. Anxiously I wondered, could I write a whole PhD thesis on how AFRICOM was not actually new and interesting?

These anxieties of course were largely misplaced: finding something surprising is almost always interesting, and not hearing what I expected raised new and productive questions for my research. In this chapter, I draw on my research experience to reflect on how interview research can be used to analyze, interpret and explain cases of military intervention.