French foreign policy in West-Africa revisited: examining French monetary and military influence on African sovereignty

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France exerts influence in francophone African countries through its combined result of monetary and military policies. This PhD project shall study the limits of postcolonial sovereignty as an endpoint of decolonisation in West-Africa by exploring the impact of this contemporary French military-monetary power structure. I shall deploy a critical approach to this question with a theoretical framework that merges international political economy, foreign policy and postcolonial currents together. I will conduct a qualitative content analysis of various sources. Data for my analysis will be drawn from French diplomatic sources, public African media and elite interviews during fieldwork in Côte d'Ivoire and Senegal - together key in understanding the extent of postcolonial sovereignty of these former colonies in relation to their former coloniser France. In this thesis, I shall develop how French colonial-style arrangements impact West-African political sovereignty through an analysis of how Ivorian and Senegalese security and monetary structures are entangled with France in ways that reproduce and sometimes challenge French domination. Through this combined military-monetary focus, this research shall contribute to the academic debate on postcolonial sovereignties by generating new insights into Afrocentric conceptions of contemporary sovereignty. This research topic falls in line with the critical works on race, imperialism and colonialism of Dr Younis and Dr Manchanda.