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

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 both the OAU and AU. Chapter 2 presents an overview of the legal, institutional, policy, and practice differences between the OAU and AU. While these two distinct organizations can be viewed on a continuum, the differences between each organization’s approach to peace and security is clear. At the creation of the OAU, the organization chose a set of norms, including non-interference in the internal affairs of member states, a commitment to enhancing the sovereignty and territorial integrity of African states, and regional primacy. These norms governed interactions between states and the management of violent conflict on the continent, and they manifested in a peace and security policy of non-interference, which meant the OAU was largely powerless to effectively address violent conflict. When the AU officially replaced the OAU, the organization embraced a very different set of norms premised on human security and sovereignty as responsibility that led to a policy of non-indifference, which allowed more forceful action to prevent and manage violent conflict even if AU norms and capacities are still very much developing. However, significant analysis of how norms may be continuing to evolve in the AU era because of modern events and changing interests is outside the scope of this volume.

The central argument of this book is that the shift from non-interference to non-indifference was a multi-stage process that was underpinned by ideas and largely internally driven. The first stage, and the starting point for understanding norms in the African regional context, is the adoption of norms that underpinned the non-interference policy at the founding of the OAU. The second stage was a period in the 1960s and 1970s of catastrophic conflicts and atrocities that had a traumatic impact on Africa’s global reputation and internal development and pushed some African leaders to re-evaluate strict non-interference. The third stage of the process is seen in the late 1970s and early 1980s when there is the beginning of a shift away from strict non-interference with the adoption of human security-oriented policies and protocols. The fourth stage is the period of the 1990s wherein African leaders created new institutions but still tried to underpin them with the same OAU era norms, and the fifth stage is the complete break from the OAU era with the establishment of the AU.

The transformation of African regional norms was spurred on by critical events in Africa, the influence of respected leaders, and evolving regional interests, and was underpinned by pan-Africanist ideas. The conflicts and atrocities that shocked many African leaders, and threatened African interests during the 1960s–1970s, included the Nigerian-Biafran war from 1967–1970 in which an estimated 600,000 civilians died, the atrocities of Uganda’s Idi Amin, and the human rights abuses of Emperor Bokassa of Central African Empire. Beyond key events and regional interests, pan-Africanism and ideas around human security and sovereignty as responsibility helped to theoretically underpin regional security cooperation and humanitarian intervention. It is these factors that led to an evolution from non-interference under the OAU to non-indifference under the AU. The shift began in the 1970s and was gradual, culminating in the AU Constitutive Act that was negotiated beginning in 1999 and adopted in July 2000. Explanations that focus primarily on the influence of the international cannot explain the shift in African policies and practices that milestones indicate began to happen before the end of the Cold War as well as before the emergence of international intervention norms.

The indications of shifting regional norms before the end of the Cold War include the lack of robust condemnation for the Tanzanian invasion of Uganda in 1979, which eventually led to the overthrow of Idi Amin, the Nigerian engagement to end conflict in Chad from 1979–1982 leading to Africa’s first multi-lateral peacekeeping mission, the proposal for an OAU Peace and Security Council in the early 1980s, and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) intervention in Liberia in 1990. These milestones were indications of changing ideas and practices within Africa about intervention and the role of the region in conflict management. Furthermore, they often preceded notable international milestones that pushed forward intervention norms at the global level. These events and a more robust comparison of international and regional developments is elaborated on in Chapter 10. While international actors can certainly influence regional norms and practices, in the case of African peace and security norms, international influence was not a primary factor in their creation and evolution, and new intervention ideas and practices were often seen first in African regional institutions.

Figure 1 Stages from the Organization of African Unity to the African Union

Norm creation and promotion

Dominance of the Global North

International relations and international law theory have extensively explored the construction, evolution, and dispersion of political and legal norms. Within international relations, constructivist theorists in particular focus on the role of ideas in shaping global governance. However, constructivist accounts of norm creation and promotion tend to fall into categories that focus on norm creation by norm entrepreneurs and dispersion through institutions and states or norms that emerge in domestic spheres and dispersion through transnational networks. Within this literature there is also often an assumption that international norms emerge in powerful states in the Global North and then are diffused to states in the Global South through emulation, coercion, or other processes.⁸ This leads to norm creation and evolution that is geographically concentrated and either coming from the top-down or the bottom-up, leaving little if any room to explore the role of regional organizations to create their own norms and contribute to global norms.

Finnemore and Sikkink argue that norm creation and dispersion happen in a three-stage process. First there is the emergence of the norm. This happens when norm entrepreneurs, individuals, or organizations that have a strong sense of appropriate behavior work to convince states to adopt a norm and then promote it. When a critical mass of states adopts the norm, it is said to reach a tipping point, which is hopefully followed by a norm cascade as more and more states adopt the norm. The final stage is internalization wherein the behavior prescribed by the norm becomes almost taken for granted.⁹ In this conception, the desirability of the norm and the quality of the states promoting it largely determine why certain norms take hold and others do not.¹⁰ This process can encompass both a bottom-up approach with norm entrepreneurs pushing for change and a top-down approach with the international community then supporting certain norms.

If there is an unwillingness to accept a particular norm, states can be subject to both domestic and international pressure. The spiral model sets out five stages of typically non-western countries adopting international norms. The first stage is repression, wherein the norm-violating state represses its population, and transnational advocacy networks seek to gather enough information on the state’s repressive practices to draw attention at the international level. The second stage is denial. At this stage, the repressive state typically denies any charges that it violates international norms and offsets criticism by making arguments about illegitimate outside interference. If sufficient pressure is applied then the norm-violating state enters stage three where it makes tactical concessions. These concessions are typically cosmetic or temporary. At this point domestic actors must link with international actors and apply pressure from above and below. The increasing pressure from domestic populations and the international community create a situation where leaders in the norm-violating state face either continuing to resist change and being removed from power or undertaking controlled liberalization. Indications of this stage are the ratification of human rights agreements and their subsequent institutionalization in domestic law. Finally, the last stage is rule-consistent behavior where the previously norm-violating state has adopted and now complies with international human rights norms.¹¹ Here again, it is advocacy by domestic actors and transnational networks with pressure from the international community that forces a change.

One instance of a Global North state supporting the creation and promotion of norms is Canada, which has supported norms rooted in human security.¹² Taking the example of seeking to ban landmines, six non-governmental organizations (NGOs) organized the International Campaign to Ban Landmines in 1992. This group grew to over 1,200 organizations in over 60 countries acting as norm entrepreneurs by lobbying governments in their respective countries. Canada became involved in 1996 when it offered to host a strategy conference.¹³ In doing so, Canada sought to use its position in the international system to directly lobby other states and use its resources to amplify the discussions. Canada also played a central role in supporting the creation of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) norm, discussed later in this chapter, as it hosted and sponsored the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), which is the body that produced the R2P report.¹⁴

There are also scholars who highlight the dominance of Global North actors in norm creation by highlighting how norms have been used to maintain a system of dominance by particular states. Third World Approaches to International Law have developed a substantive challenge to some of the premises of international law.¹⁵ For instance, Anghie argues that the foundations of international law, and notably the doctrine of sovereignty, were created to manage the relationship between European and non-European spheres during the colonial era.¹⁶ Upon independence, new states tried to revise old international law doctrines, which furthered western interests, or even create new doctrines to further the interests of newly independent states. For example, new states pushed for permanent sovereignty over natural resources.¹⁷ This is a doctrine that argues the natural resources of a territory belong to the people of a territory; therefore people who lived in formerly colonized territories could assert sovereignty over those resources because their sovereignty preceded colonialism. In this way new states were asserting a right against state responsibility and respecting the obligations of predecessor states in a manner that would have enhanced their economic and political sovereignty.¹⁸ This challenge to the international system did not result in significant changes to how sovereignty was practiced. However, as this volume will show, there are instances where actors in the Global South have contributed substantially to international norms, and these contributions are under-acknowledged. Overall, the totality of political and legal norm scholarship begs further questions on the role actors in the Global South play in norm creation and promotion.

Contributions of Global South actors

There is an emerging literature on the active role that actors in the Global South play in constructing and promoting norms. This literature does not seek to negate power disparities in the international system but rather it is to highlight instances where Global South actors have been influential but perhaps unacknowledged. Sikkink demonstrates this disparity between influence and acknowledgment in her work on the role of Latin American protagonists in the creation of global human rights norms. Latin American countries drafted the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man (American Declaration) eight months before the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was passed by the UN General Assembly in December 1948.¹⁹ During negotiations to draft the UDHR, Latin American delegations, particularly Mexico, Cuba, and Chile, drew on their own constitutional traditions and experience with the American Declaration to almost singlehandedly insert language into the UDHR on rights to justice.²⁰

Coleman and Tieku have identified four pathways through which African actors have developed African norms and at times contributed to international norms.²¹ First, African individuals, organizations, and networks have shaped global norm creation processes. For instance, Boutros Boutros Ghali, Francis Deng, and Kofi Annan were all instrumental in distinct ways in pushing forward a norm of humanitarian intervention.²² The second pathway is through a deliberate African regional subsidiarity push. Through the process of subsidiarity, Global South actors adopt norms in a bid to preserve their autonomy and protect themselves from outside domination. One such norm in the African context was the norm of pan-African solidarity, which has recently been utilized to shield some African leaders from prosecution by the International Criminal Court (ICC).²³ Third, distinctive norms may emerge from a coalition of African states that develop a norm to address a common problem. And fourth, norms may emerge from the efforts of nonstate actors who advocate for particular norms through their governments or institutions.²⁴

Expanding on the example of African contributions to intervention norms, the UN Secretary General Kofi Annan issued a challenge at the UN General Assembly in September 1999 for the international community to reflect on human security and intervention. As discussed above, the Canadian government responded by announcing the establishment of the ICISS in September 2000.²⁵ The Commission was asked to reconcile the tensions between upholding state sovereignty and the humanitarian necessity of protecting civilians after the atrocities in Rwanda and Kosovo.²⁶ It was comprised of a group of academics, diplomats, and policy-makers from across the globe and co-chaired by Gareth Evans and Mohamed Sahnoun. The ICISS report was released in December 2001.

There are numerous examples of ideas and practices originating in African institutions that pushed forward thinking on responding to crises and humanitarian intervention prior to the release of the ICISS report. For instance, ECOWAS sought to impose a ceasefire in a civil war through a non-consensual military intervention in August 1990.²⁷ Francis Deng proposed the initial concept of sovereignty as responsibility in a book chapter and then further elaborated on the concept in a 1996 book.²⁸ And of course, the AU codified Article 4(h) asserting the right of a regional organization to intervene in the internal affairs of a member state in response to atrocities in their Constitutive Act that was adopted in 2000 and entered into force in May 2001. Given the significant development of humanitarian intervention ideas and practices originating in Africa in the 1990s, Darkwa, Acharya, and other scholars have sought to draw out the contributions of African institutions and scholars to the creation of the R2P norm and the advancement of intervention practices,²⁹ but other R2P scholarship as well as the ICISS report itself focus on the NATO intervention in Kosovo in 1999 and the UN interventions in Somalia and Iraq in the early 1990s coupled with the 1994 tragedy of the genocide in Rwanda without engaging with the practices of African institutions that pushed forward a humanitarian intervention norm.³⁰ Too often these discourses are dominant, and Africa becomes a space where tragedies on its soil spur action but ideas and practices from African institutions are not seen as contributing to the response.

Regional organizations in norm creation and promotion

There is some literature that considers the role of regional organizations in the Global South in norm creation. Acharya argues that regions are part of a legitimate normative order and have agency when choosing how to receive international norms. Constitutive localization is the active construction (through discourse, framing, grafting, and cultural selection) of foreign ideas by local actors, which results in a norm developing significant congruence with local beliefs and practices.³¹ The Association