L’action extérieure de l’UE au Sahel : une mise en pratique de l’approche globale?

Politiques européennes. Sécurité extérieure et intérieure de l'Union européenne (SESI)In 2011, the European Union published its first integrated framework to address a regional crisis in Africa: the Sahel strategy. It aims at enforcing the principles of the comprehensive approach by using CSDP military and civilian missions, humanitarian aid, development cooperation, trade policies and diplomatic action in a coherent and complementary way. The expected result is to put the Sahel region back on track by initiating a virtuous circle of security, state capacity building and development. To achieve this goal, European Institutions have first worked at a structural level, towards a better civil-military coordination (e.g. with the creation of the CMPD) and cooperation (e.g. by using the EUDs as field coordination bodies). Second, new tools such as IcSP and AGIR have been created to ensure the complementarity of development cooperation with humanitarian aid on the one hand, and with further processing the security missions on the other. This paper aims at assessing if these initiatives permitted to fulfil the objective of a comprehensive approach in Sahel. But to do this, it will also tackle questions such as the Economic partnership agreement with West Africa, the geographical scale of the Sahel strategy and the intensity of the diplomatic involvement in the region