French Defense Forces

Airstrikes and “stability”: What’s the French army doing in Chad?, 2019

Between 3 and 6 February, the French army launched airstrikes against a rebel convoy in Chad. The intervention came at the request of Chadian authorities, who welcomed France’s cooperation and the “neutralisation” of the fighters. Considering the long history of French involvement in its former African colonies, there is nothing exceptional about these strikes. In fact, Chad has experienced more French military interventions since independence than any other African country.

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 2001

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 2000

CF2R, Paris, 2013

2016

International Affairs, 2020

Journal of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies (in Asia)

Foreign military bases are the important means for power projection. In Africa, military bases represent the symbol of France's sphere of influence, which have strengthened France's protection of her economic, political, cultural, overseas national and security interests. The bases are of great significance to enhance French intervention capabilities, making France the most influential external power in the African continent.

Nowadays Chad is becoming increasingly relevant as a security partner for the West and for France in particular. Despite the increased influence in the African geopolitical scenario, it is difficult to fully understand the country’s objectives and how it manages to achieve them. Indeed, a close study of Chad’s history and political environment shows the impact of how the idea on the use of force as a regulator of social and power issues on the country strategy, which is based on military activism In brief, in Chadians’ psychology there is an almost complete absence of the concept of “soft power”.

Academia Biology, 2023

Maintaining biodiversity over time is paramount to the functioning of coral reef ecosystems. Species abundance and richness change over time, but overall biodiversity supports ecosystem functions and services. A decrease in biodiversity can detrimentally impact reefs; phase shifts have the potential to fundamentally alter the dominance of stony corals and structure of reef communities. SCUBA diver photography can form important baseline information on both species- and taxa-level diversity trends on less-accessible reefs over decades. Historic photographs can be analyzed to form a complimentary timeline with more formal monitoring and sampling via benthic transects, point intercept, and visual surveys. This timeline may be especially important to understand long-term trends and subtle changes associated with climate change. An assessment of changes in reef benthos was carried out, combining scientific surveys with recreational underwater photographs from SCUBA divers beginning in 1980 to 2015. Reefs that were consistently visited in the Exuma Cays Land and Sea Park, The Bahamas were targeted for collecting photographs cataloged by date and dive site. The photography image database provided an exceptional opportunity to study key benthic species from 2,073 slides and 337 1-meter quadrats collected at five dive sites from 1980 to 2010. Changes in reef biodiversity with a focus on cnidarians, sponges, and annelids were evaluated with diversity indices and multivariate analyses using diver photos and more recently, 1-meter quadrat surveys, to evaluate community changes over time on deep (<−10 m) platform margin reefs.