8. Managing Fragility? Chad’s (Il)liberal Interventions and the Making of a Regional Hegemon

Only a short time ago, the press described President Idriss Déby’s regime in Chad as isolated, illegitimate, and barely clinging to power. Yet, while the 2000s were punctuated by coup attempts, armed insurrections, and mass desertions in the Chadian armed forces, today Déby has upgraded his country’s status into being an assertive and critical regional player. The Chadian President has profited from the incentives set out by the international community to intervene in a variety of African crises (i.e., Mali, Central African Republic [CAR], and Nigeria), helping consolidate his—until recently—tenuous position at home and abroad. Chad is the current representation of the hackneyed phrase, “African solutions to African problems”. However, one must not forget that Chad’s meteoric rise has been facilitated by important states in the international system, mainly France but also the United States. The emergence of Déby’s Chad depends both on its ability to accomplish sub-imperial tasks encouraged by these actors, while obfuscating undemocratic governance and human rights abuses at home. Nonetheless, Déby’s role in regional security has helped him achieve a certain degree of agency in his relationship with the international community, one that would appear on the surface as highly asymmetric. In reality, Chad’s military interventions are a combination of desire on the part of the international community to stabilize the Sahel along with the result of diverse spectrum of elite Chadian interests to gain legitimacy and maintain control of the state. These range from “liberal” desires to help control the region’s trouble spots in places like Mali, to clearly illiberal meddling in the domestic affairs of neighbors like the CAR, with the fight against Boko Haram somewhere in the middle. This chapter seeks to shed light on the dramatic change in Chad’s rise from “fragile” state to regional hegemon, without losing sight of its subordinate position in the international system. To do this, we examine two of Chad’s recent military interventions (Mali and CAR) and portray them within the context of apparently competing liberal and illiberal interests. This leads us to a better explanation of Déby’s recent rise at home and abroad. The focus of the book is political adaptation in the fragile spaces. We want to see an explanation of Chad’s intervention in Mali and CAR through this framework. One way to do this is to focus on the implications of Chad’s regional status for the meaning of fragility: is Chad trying to get out of being branded a fragile state? Is Chad’s promotion of liberal peace in the region aimed at changing the external (mostly western) understanding of Chad as a fragile state?