African peace

Regional norms from the Organization of African Unity to the African Union

Kathryn Nash

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781526152800
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: African Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

African regional organizations have played leading roles in constructing collective conflict management rules for the continent, but these rules or norms have not been static. Currently, the African Union (AU) deploys monitors, authorizes peace support operations, and actively engages to resolve internal conflicts. Just a few decades ago, these actions would have been deeply controversial under the Organization of African Unity (OAU). What changed to allow for this transformation in the way the African regional organization approaches peace and security? African peace examines why the OAU chose norms in 1963 that prioritized state security and led to a policy of strict non-interference - even in the face of destabilizing violence - and why the AU chose very different norms leading to a disparate conflict management policy in the early 2000s. Even if the AU's capacity to respond to conflict is still developing, this new policy has made the region more willing and capable of responding to violence. Nash argues that norm creation largely happened within the African context, and international pressure was not a determinant factor in their evolution. The role of regions in the international order, particularly the African region, has been under-theorized and under-acknowledged, and this book adds to an emerging literature that explores the role of regional organizations in the Global South in creating and promoting norms based on their own experiences and for their own purposes.

1

Introduction

Who contributes to the ideas or norms that govern the international system? The literature has explored the role of norm entrepreneurs, international institutions, courts, transnational networks, and states to create and promote norms that set expectations for how global society should work.¹ However, there is often a piece of the puzzle that is missing. Regional organizations have defined regional priorities, created norms and policies, and contributed to international norms. Yet, despite their impact at both the regional and international levels, the contributions of regional institutions as norm creators and promoters, particularly in marginalized regions, is under-examined. This book analyzes how African regional organizations created peace and security norms in order to better understand the role regional organizations play in shaping international society. It argues that the Organization of African Unity (OAU) and then the African Union (AU) uniquely adapted existing international norms as well as created new peace and security norms within their regional sphere and largely independent of international pressure.

Norms are collective expectations for appropriate behavior.² They are vital because they can provide legitimacy in the international system. They can prescribe standards, and they can be both an instrument of power and an obstacle to its use.³ For instance, norms can constrain power by limiting the types of weapons that can be used in war.⁴ But they can be an instrument of power when they are used to promote a system that is beneficial to certain actors. While it is important to understand how powerful states have created and used norms to enhance and maintain power, it is equally important to investigate how norms have been created and used by less powerful actors. This volume not only explores the specific processes and strategies used by African regional organizations to create norms but also how African regional bodies then used their norms to enhance African legitimacy and power. In examining these issues, this book illuminates the influence of regional organizations in the Global South and adds to an emerging and overdue literature on the global governance contributions of these organizations.⁵ It also contributes to our understanding of norm creation within the specific spaces of regional organizations. As such, it has implications both for the role that regional organizations play in shaping norms in their own spheres and also the role they play in shaping and promoting international norms.

Specifically, I ask why the OAU chose norms in 1963 that underpinned a non-interference conflict management policy and why the AU chose very different norms in the early 2000s that led to a non-indifference conflict management policy. I argue that African regional organizations created norms for their own purposes and based on their own experiences, and international influence was not a determinant factor in the evolving peace and security norms within Africa. As Chapter 4 will demonstrate, the OAU adopted norms of non-interference in the internal affairs of member states, protection of state sovereignty and territorial integrity, and regional primacy that led to a conflict management policy of non-interference even in the face of conflicts that threatened atrocities or regional stability. However, norms are not static, and they evolved in the regional context so much so that the AU adopted norms that emphasized human security and allowed for intervention in the internal affairs of member states in some circumstances. These norms led to a new conflict management policy of non-indifference. Chapters 6–9 explore the evolution of these norms while Chapter 11 discusses the creation of the AU. While the AU has not always been able to prevent or stop conflict, the non-indifference policy has meant that the African regional organization is far more willing and capable of engaging in conflict management on the continent. I argue that the shift from non-interference to non-indifference was incremental, began as early as the 1970s, and was largely internally driven within Africa. Norm creation and evolution was predicated on advocacy by leaders, mutually constituted regional ideas and interests, and experiences. Understanding processes of norm creation and evolution within the OAU and now the AU is a starting point for demonstrating how norms crafted by African regional institutions contribute to norms that are adopted more widely in the international system.

Contrary to interpretations that focus on the role of global events or influence, the emergence of norms that supported the shift from non-interference to non-indifference does not begin in the context of the post-Cold War world. Instead it begins in the context of the immediate post-independence world. The adoption of norms that underpinned non-interference was the starting point for norm creation by African regional institutions, and scholars can only understand the emergence of norms that underpin non-indifference by understanding norm creation in the post-colonial period and its progression over time. The process of evolution was not perfectly linear, and the transition should be seen as a slow institutional progression interspersed with failures, multiple phases, and several factors pushing it forward as well as back.

The larger implication is that theories of international relations that chiefly attribute changes in domestic and regional norms to international dynamics or the influence of powerful states are underdetermining. They neglect key motors of change, which are found in ideas, values, experiences, and both material and non-material interests. The idea of pan-Africanism and how it shaped regional interests along with the collective experience of the African region under colonialism and immediately after independence, in addition to advocacy by African leaders, played a major role in determining the norms chosen at the advent of the OAU. Likewise, the normative shifts within Africa cannot be seen as largely attributable to shifts in global politics or the influence of major states or international institutions. The transformation of the understanding of pan-Africanism, the experiences of African states with conflicts and atrocities, advocacy by key leaders, and regional interests were the main drivers.

This book focuses on regional organizations because these institutions are the framework through which all of these factors are channeled to culminate in norm creation. It also focuses specifically on African regional organizations. However, this is not an argument that Africa is unique in its ability to construct norms and influence international norms. Rather it is an in-depth study of African regional organizations that puts forward a theoretical framework on norm creation that could potentially be applied to other regional organizations. As an overview of the existing literature will show, norm creation is often assumed to have arisen at the international or domestic levels. However, it is important to show how norms are created and promoted by Global South regional organizations that are often understood to predominantly be the recipients of norms, in order to understand how those regions emerged from decolonization struggles and sought to contribute and continue to contribute to the ideas that govern the international system.

Evidence and approach

This book employs a process-tracing methodology using archival documents collected from the AU Commission Archives. Sources include speeches from African leaders at the OAU founding conference, verbatim meeting records, administrative reports and budgets, reports prepared for the Council of Ministers and Heads of State and Government, and summit agendas and outcome documents. As a general methodology, process-tracing focuses on tracing theoretical causal-mechanisms. It looks at events over time, and sequencing is very important. This makes it uniquely suited to analyzing the creation and evolution of norms over a 40–year period between the creation of the OAU to the AU.

There are different types of process-tracing that are used at different junctures in this study. Theory-testing process-tracing takes theory from existing literature and then tests whether evidence demonstrates that the hypothesized causal mechanisms are present in a case. Theory-building process-tracing attempts to build theoretical explanations from empirical evidence.⁶ In this book, the change in norms in the constitutive documents of African regional organizations is the dependent variable that is investigated. I test whether the creation and evolution of norms in Africa fits within existing theories of institutional change and norm creation. As will be discussed, I do find that the evolution from the OAU to the AU fits within Mark Blyth’s institutional change theory, which is critical for explaining the timing of the formal institutional and normative shift from the OAU to the AU. However, I demonstrate that existing norm creation theories do not fit this case. Therefore, I also use theory-building process-tracing to explain the theoretical causal mechanisms by which the OAU and AU chose specific norms, and this theory can be applied in other regional contexts. The nature of theory is a contested concept in international relations. I do not claim that my theory has predictive power but rather that it explains a phenomenon of norm development within regional organizations and can be applied and tested across different contexts.

While process-tracing is valuable, there are cautions and critiques of the method. Notably, there are multiple causal paths that may lead to the same outcome.⁷ The normative shift from the OAU to the AU is widely explored in the literature, and I explore alternative explanations later in this chapter and demonstrate how archival evidence disproves existing explanations. Other dominant explanations focus on the period immediately surrounding the change in the constitutive document in the transition from the OAU to the AU. This has led to a focus on international pressure or changing global dynamics in the post-Cold War period. The value of this book is that the starting point is the creation of the OAU, so it includes analysis of the creation and breakdown of OAU norms as well as the construction of a new system that includes periods of progression and regression. In short, my study starts with the events that fed into the change, analyzing and understanding each distinct period but also viewing them temporally. It is through this analysis that I am able to show that the change began well before the end of the Cold War and thus challenge explanations that focus on international pressure and global dynamics due to the sequencing of events. Furthermore, I sought to triangulate my evidence by finding multiple sources to prove my argument. I began by consulting the primary sources and then compared these sources to diplomatic and academic accounts. I also compared speeches and debate records against the actions, funding priorities, and policies of the OAU. I also used very limited interviews with AU officials, primarily around the interpretation of recent events and evolving AU peace and security mechanisms.

Finally, given that the methodology is process-tracing, this volume does rely on internal documents, which of course have biases as they are produced by the organization being studied. However, the purpose of this book is not to critically examine the utility or effectiveness of African regional organizations but rather to analyze the process that led to a change in norms between the OAU and AU. In doing so, it adds to the literature on the history of the OAU, but fundamentally, it is a challenge and contribution to international relations literature on the creation of norms and the role of regional organizations.

Overview of argument

The history of African regional organizations can be split into the two phases of the OAU period from 1963–2002 and the AU period from 2002 onward. This book does provide some vital context around decolonization struggles and the emergence of pan-Africanism, but the focus is on the period around the creation of the OAU and the period between the OAU and the AU. This focus allows me to concentrate on why and how particular norms were chosen at the advent of b...