Why did France intervene in Mali? Examining the Role of Intervention Entrepreneurs

Intervention Entrepreneurs are the key to understanding the political processes leading up to a military intervention and thus ultimately why military interventions come about. Intervention entrepreneurs are private citizens, bureaucrats, associations and groups which lobby for intervention. In this process they follow a similar playbook to promote their intervention proposal. This playbook contains five different tasks: (1) creating a narrative for intervention; (2) selling the narrative; (3) building a domestic coalition supportive of the intervention; (4) creating faits accomplis that accelerate the path toward intervention and (5) lobbying the head of state in favor of the intervention proposal. This article illustrates these five tasks by means of a case study of the decision-making process that led to the French intervention in Mali (2013)