When anti-neocolonialism is 'bespoke’ : exploring local perceptions of external interventions in Africa's humanitarian crises

Across Africa, local opposition to external interventions is escalating. United Nations peacekeeping operations have become targets of public critique and occasionally lethal assaults by armed militias and local residents. Global powers such as France and regional organizations like ECOWAS have also encountered similar criticism, often provoking public demonstrations that involve burning French flags and hoisting Russian flags, particularly between 2021 and 2024 in the Sahelian countries of Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger. Public opinion among protesters suggests that neocolonialism and the gap between public expectations and the outcomes of peace initiatives are responsible for these sudden rejections and resentments toward French-led interventions. Notably, public resentments do not constitute a comprehensive account of external interventions in Africa. In South Sudan, UN peace operations and the narrative surrounding external interventions differ significantly from other contexts. While occasional obstructions to humanitarian aid have occurred due to ongoing violence, local populations and South Sudanese political elites generally display an open attitude toward interventions. Despite disparities in local perceptions and responses, there has been limited effort to understand how perceptions of external interventions are shaped and to explore why certain communities exhibit greater resistance while others are more compliant. When local populations employ terminology such as ‘neocolonialism’ to express their frustrations with external interventions, there has been limited analysis of how the term is interpreted at the grassroots level or its relevance in other contexts with similar colonial histories. Using data from fieldwork in Mali and South Sudan alongside secondary sources, this research contends that in post-colonial African contexts such as these, local perceptions of external interventions are expressed through historical memories of colonial domination and neocolonial subservience, but are filtered through context-specific and pragmatic responses—an approach I term bespoke anti-neocolonialism. This framework challenges liberal peacekeeping assumptions of universal legitimacy by engaging in, rather than merely proposing, a grassroots methodology for evaluating external interventions, while expanding scholarship on neocolonialism by emphasizing locally adapted variants of anti-neocolonialism that may be overlooked when the subject is examined from predominantly structuralist, deterministic perspectives.