The politics of UN agencies’ exit from post-war African contexts – POLEXA

If international operations are not supposed to last over time, their withdrawal, whether in Afghanistan in 2021 or Mali in 2022, often leads to great improvisation and sometimes chaos. While the end of military interventions has received considerable media and academic attention, the issue of the exit of international organizations (IOs) with a diplomatic mission from post-war situations is little discussed and that of IOs with a sectoral vocation, such as UN agencies, even less so. Yet, this is not only of scientific interest, but also a crucial matter at practical and political levels. When UN agencies decide to downsize or even close an office, they not only limit the scope of public action in terms of funding and human resources, but they also change priorities and affect power and state-society relations. How are policymaking processes, state authority, and legitimacy shaped by the withdrawal of UN agencies? This is the central question asked by the POLEXA Project. More broadly, we consider IO’s exit in this region as a valuable perspective on the dilemmas met by UN agencies on the ground in their will to pacify, democratize and develop post-war societies. We will seek to understand how UN agencies prioritize operations in a context of reduced funds, anticipate the future, and manage the risks of their intervention. Ultimately, we will assess the ways they attempt to pass the baton to local institutions and how local actors receive, reinterpret or contest UN norms and practices. We will address these questions through comparative research using two cases (Côte d’Ivoire and Central African Republic), in addition to a study of UN agencies and transnational networks at the regional scale of West and central Africa. This will require an innovative research design, from the perspective of the Political sociology of international relations, and rigorous qualitative methods, supported by a complementary research team.