Blinded War? Assessing the Relationship Between Grand Strategy and Intervention in France during the 2013 Malian Crisis

Through an analysis of the decision-making process that led to the French intervention in Mali in 2013, this work attempts to put into perspective the notion of 'grand strategy' and its interactions with the implementation of French foreign policy. A vague concept sometimes disparaged but consistently put forward in leading international relations journals, grand strategy raises questions about its polymorphic scope. By returning to the genesis of its raison d'être (to act as a lodestar for the shepherd-State lost in the storm of international politics), we propose to track the influence that grand strategy holds on different decision-making steps. Was grand strategy apparent in the French authority’s management of the Malian crisis? Yes, our analysis suggests. Drawing on a neoclassical realist framework and borrowing from the tools of foreign policy analysis, we highlight the tensions between the various players in the crisis, caught between organizational divergences and inescapable systemic incentives, all of which shaped the implementation of French grand strategy as much as the latter shaped the French response.