Dr Darrin McDonald

Chadian President Idriss Déby Itno died on 20 April 2021 on the front lines against rebels from the Front for Change and Concord in Chad (FACT). Following Déby’s death, a military committee headed by his son, Mahamat Déby, seized power and initiated a transition that led to Mahamat’s election to presidency in May 2024. Domestic conditions have worsened in the interim, and the Lake Chad Basin and Sahel are now among the most unstable regions in the world. Idriss Déby was a key figure in regional security operations and employed gatekeeping and neopatrimonialism to direct resources towards strengthening Chad’s forces, but the prolonged transition has called into question the extent to which this strategy of rentier peacekeeping can be maintained. This article assesses why Chad is facing this crisis and how the transition has impacted domestic and regional conditions. This rests on theorisation of the Chadian state, analysis of Chad’s history and transition to date, and application of theories of gatekeeper states, neopatrimonialism and omnibalancing to assess where the state is headed in the immediate term, concluding that a transition lacking real democratic transformation will exacerbate rather than alleviate tensions in Chad and the surrounding region.

Why did the United Kingdom (UK) prioritise post-Brexit free trade agreements (FTAs) with Australia and New Zealand, despite the almost negligible economic benefits on offer? We address this puzzle by focusing on practices in trade policy, contributing to a broader agenda emphasising their role in International Political Economy (IPE). More specifically, we use the concept of performativity to argue that the UK’s pursuit of these agreements reflected a desire to repeatedly perform sovereignty and independence from the European Union (EU): The act of negotiating and signing agreements was more important than policy content or economic impact. This performance of trade policy independence relied on a series of Eurosceptic scripts related to the Anglosphere—an imagined community of English-speaking nations with which the UK purportedly shared neoliberal economic values. As the prospects of a trade agreement with the United States (US) receded, the UK Government improvised on these Anglosphere scripts. The FTAs with Australia and New Zealand were recast as contributions to a wider Asia-Pacific tilt in UK trade policy, a region equated with economic dynamism and commitment to free trade, albeit without the historic connection to the UK.