Introduction

Military interventions involve a wide array of intervening actors, ranging from international and regional organizations to nation-state actors and violent as well as non-violent non-state actors. Mali is a prominent example of a contemporary intervention site where several military missions and mandates overlap and where a large number of intervening actors have been engaged since 2012. After several coups d’état in Mali, the further proliferation of jihadist groups in the Sahel region and the (partial) withdrawal of European troops in 2022, the country is increasingly seen as another potential case of failure of international interventionism, shortly after the disastrous withdrawal of Western troops from Afghanistan in 2021.

This chapter will not deal with the overall question of whether the international interventions in Mali can be assessed as success or failure. Instead, it seeks to highlight a more specific ‘dark side’ of inter-organizational interventions in Mali during the last decade. The cooperation among international organizations (IOs) such as the United Nations (UN), the European Union (EU), and new regional coalitions of states, such as G5 Sahel Joint Force, has yielded several negative effects on the protection of civilians (PoC). Given that PoC is a core norm of peacekeeping missions, the weakening of the implementation of this norm also impacted negatively on the local perception of the UN Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission (MINUSMA) in Mali.

In the fields of international peace and security governance, policy makers and analysts alike have often treated cooperation among IOs as a desirable policy objective in itself. The burgeoning rhetoric of security partnerships among organizations after the end of the Cold War is an indicator of this optimism. Franke (2017: 19) has noted in a review of theoretical approaches to IOR that ‘current research is restricted by the still dominant equation of (inter-organizational) relations with cooperation, coordination, or collaboration. Examinations of competition and conflict already take place but should be strongly encouraged and expanded.’

In the spirit of this suggestion, this chapter seeks to elucidate more problematic and conflictive dimensions of inter-organizational collaboration itself: the weakening of the implementation of a core norm of peacekeeping missions.