African Union_Reading Memo

How to maintain security and peace on the African continent is a question to which is really difficult to find a clear answer. African conflicts are very special in their nature as each African country has its distinct culture, history, beliefs and people.  The idea that the best way how to keep peace in Africa is that the Africans themselves should solve their continent’s problems has been a common part of political debates already a long time. It is important to mention that attributing a certain security role to regional organizations is quite a new issue in the African context. The regional dimension of conflict management remained rather undeveloped in the African conditions during the Cold War.

Since 2002 we can witness increasing efforts to unify politically (in the context of an open dialogue between all countries) all 55 countries on the African continent. The African Union (AU) was established in order to achieve greater unity and solidarity between the countries. It also identifies as its major components eight regional economic communities (RECs) with a peacekeeping and security mandate: IGAD, SADC, ECOWAS, East African Community (EAC), Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA), and further on the Arab Maghreb Union (UMA), Community of Sahel-Saharan States (CEN-SAD), and Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS).

Furthermore, a unifying platform called African peacekeeping and security architecture (APSA) which evolved in the late 1990s is connecting institutions and mechanisms functioning at a continental, regional and national level. Plus, the national level is formed by member states of the African Union.

However, as was mentioned in most of the articles. African Union is facing some major challenges when it comes to maintaining the stability and peace on its soil. There is a persisting dependence of AU peacekeeping operations on non-African assistance coming especially from the UN, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the EU. It is interesting to point out that this dependence undermines the key rhetoric principle of the Union’s approach to conflict management, which is giving preference to African solutions. What is more, in the military dimension, African Union needs to strive for the provision of a greater number of soldiers and technology to be able to conduct independent complex peacekeeping operations.

These facts should not serve as the main incentives to portray African Union as incapable of bringing peace to the continent. It is important to remember that the organization is still quite young and it is shaping its approach to different issues gradually. Nevertheless, African leaders must admit that broader and deeper cooperation with the United Nations is necessary for the further development. As the article written by Williams and Boutellis, Partnership peacekeeping: Challenges and opportunities in the United Nations–African Union Relationship, in some cases are both actors deeply divided over how to respond to the crises (e.g. in Libya and Cote d’Ivoire) or over financing the AU missions (e.g. in Somalia). But who should decide the best way of responding to Africa’s peace and security crises?

Cooperative frameworks between multi-faceted institutions all face the generic problem that agreement on general principles does not automatically generate consensus on how to act in particular crises. The UN Security Council has the primary – but not exclusive – responsibility for maintaining international peace and security, including in Africa. But there is the constant risk of creating inflexible structures, which can become redundant if powerful actors feel constrained and work around them to change the situation on the ground.

The peace operations that the AU undertakes are to a large extent a regional response to global problems. Most African conflicts are global in the sense that they are heavily influenced, if not driven, by external factors such as the global war on terror; the UN-NATO-led intervention in Libya; the exploitation of natural resources by multinational companies; capital flight facilitated and solicited by the international financial system; and transnational organized crime, driven by markets in the West and Asia for narcotics, human trafficking, timber and illegally caught fish. Effective African peace operations represent a significant contribution to the global common good.

But the AU does not have the capacity to develop multi-dimensional missions that can sustain peace over the long-term. This is where the UN’s ability to recruit a large civilian component in every mission and its predictable funding give it a competitive advantage. Hybrid missions such as the United Nations–African Union Mission in Darfur (UNAMID) and the UN’s support for AU missions like AMISOM show that a strategic relationship between the two institutions is possible and useful to managing conflict on the continent.

The problem is that the UN Security Council does not always respect the AU’s views. It is further exacerbated by the lack of a strong unified AU voice in New York. This is partly due to the limited AU representation, which lacks both a strong mandate and human and financial capacities. As the articles stressed out, the AU’s philosophy of ‘peace support operations’ is significantly different, in part because they are intended to address the entire spectrum of conflict management challenges as opposed to the UN’s focus on supporting existing ceasefires and peace agreements.

However, those different views and opinions should not be perceived as definite obstacles that would make further cooperation impossible. It is clear that the UN-AU partnership is driven by particular political and security circumstances that motivated the organizations to develop pragmatic solutions, and they did not result from a joint assessment of the situations or a shared vision of how to address them. I believe that the closer partnership between those two actors is not an option, but necessity.

Especially the last case of problems in Burundi show how weak AU is vis-à-vis its members. As an organization that on paper seeks the well-being of its population, the AU has not done enough in this crisis to prove its commitment to its principles. Acting tough toward Burundi would have set an example and demonstrated that the AU is committed to protecting the population of Burundi if the state fails to do so. AU action could have encouraged the United Nations and the international community to take strong measures as well.

With the AU's institutional and normative apparatus, Africa has one of the most advanced and extensive security architectures in the world, aimed at addressing conflict prevention, management and resolution, as well as post-conflict reconstruction objectives. However, it is still far from being able to operationalize a true and effective R2P regime. To some extent, many of these constraints are common to other international organizations, including: hard bargaining among member states or issues of political willingness to intervene and contribute in terms of personnel and/or funds. In the case of the AU these limitations more than likely result from the fact that it is composed mainly of poor, developing and authoritarian states that are unable or unwilling to activate both the principles and capacities of the AU in the field of peace and security.

It is difficult to say what steps should be taken in order to overcome those problems and make the AU more effective in the security field. I think that African leaders themselves must make specific steps towards R2P principles and their implementation. Only then can be the AU perceived as reliable security players among others international organizations that exist in the international arena.