L’union ou la force ? Les défis des opérations multinationales contemporaines
Contemporary multinational military operations occur in a strategic context characterized by the domination of limited conflicts for Western states.
As such, those interventions are marked by a tension between the military logic of integration as a condition of effectiveness and the political logic of state autonomy. This situation leads to a number of specific dynamics, such as the imposition of restrictions on the use of force (“caveats”), the difficulty to achieve the unity of purpose and the unity of command, and the search for an increase of international legitimacy through the number of participants to the intervention. This article analyses the dynamics of contemporary multinational interventions, and explores potential ways to manage the difficulties related to the dialectic between integration and autonomy.
This content is available in French: L’union ou la force ? Les défis des opérations multinationales contemporaines
Author(s)
Related centers and programs
Discover our other research centers and programs
Security Studies Center
Heir to a tradition dating back to the founding of Ifri, the Security Studies Center provides public and private decision-makers as well as the general public with the keys to understanding power relations and contemporary modes of conflict as well as those to come. Through its positioning at the juncture of politics and operations, the credibility of its civil-military team and the wide distribution of its publications in French and English, the Center for Security Studies constitutes in the French landscape of think tanks a unique center of research and influence on the national and international defense debate.
Find out more
Discover all our analyses
The Evolving Role of Nuclear Rhetoric in Iran’s Strategic Calculus
How has the Iranian strategic discourse about nuclear weapons and deterrence evolved?
Design, Destroy, Dominate. The Mass Drone Warfare as a Potential Military Revolution
The widespread use of drones observed in Ukraine—both in terms of the scale of the fleets deployed and their omnipresence in the operations of both belligerents—appears to meet the conditions of a genuine military revolution.
The Hunt for Economic Security: The Role of Navies in Deterring Threats to the Maritime Economy
The maritime domain is currently faced with a wide variety of threats, such as climate change, economic warfare, shadow fleet operations, protection of critical infrastructures, and illicit activities ranging from illegal fishing to piracy. Navies suffer from inherent limitations when deterring threats to the global maritime economy: their global presence and permanence limits their credibility in terms of deterrence, their focus usually set on immediate deterrence, implementing deterrence by punishment in and from the naval domain is difficult and costly.
A Fragile Consensus? The Pressure on the Norm Against Nuclear Testing
Apart from North Korea, no state has conducted explosive nuclear tests in the 21st century, reflecting the emergence of a strong international norm against such testing.