Twenty-first century European-African relations have been characterized by a novel form of intervention that fuses peacekeeping endeavors with military counterterrorism strategies. Their dynamics blur conventional lines of division between peace and war, as well as intervention and sovereignty. This has prompted two sets of questions around the justification and framing of interventionist foreign policy. The first pertains to shifting sites of political authority that pursue legitimate uses of violence. The second revolves around the non-tangible yet fundamental modes of legitimation that mobilize citizenries in support of material assistance to others. This dissertation conjoins these inquiries through reappraisal of German participation in the UN-led MINUSMA peacekeeping mission in Mali (2013-2023). Moving beyond conventional foreign policy analysis, it revisits German-Malian relations through the lens of a 2017 German army recruitment web series that acted as commentary on the above mission to solicit support among would-be military volunteers and the wider German public. Taking a hermeneutic approach to examine the indexical properties of the series’ musical aesthetics, the dissertation offers insight into the cognitive and affective frames that guided German intervention in Mali. It finds that these took on postwar German departures of multilateralism and cooperative security strategies, yet not without sonic displays, intimations, and appeals to anterior affective structures of civilization and responsibility along racial hierarchies. This opens larger insights into political aesthetics as both a sensory mode of perception, and a normative distribution of tastes that animate an emotive and cognitive appeal to memory, identity, and conceptions of political belonging as these relate to notions of hierarchy, power, and a sense of self in the world. Such appeals operate alongside more parochial foreign policy objectives. Whether actively employed in their service or emblematic of the broader imaginaries that guide them, political aesthetics invariably serve as vitalizing tools of international relations that disposition subjects and consequently mobilize bodies for various political purposes. Along these lines, this dissertation seeks as much to point to the errors of omitting the role of music and affect in understanding foreign policy, as it seeks to ask what such inclusions mean for epistemological re-conceptions of the international.