Regional Organizations in African Security

Fredrik Soderbaum, Rodrigo Tavares

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781317985761
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

The African continent is plagued by some of the most brutal and violent conflicts in the world. At the same time that warfare is changing, so has the state's capacity to provide security and political stability to its citizens. This book deals with the role of regional organizations in Africa's security. It focuses on three basic—yet often overlooked—questions: (1) the advantages and disadvantages of African regional and sub-regional organizations vis-à-vis other security mechanisms, (2) the official and unofficial reasons to intervene, and (3) whether security is actually protected by the peace activities carried out by the regional organizations.

The contributors to the book—all leading researchers in the field—systematically assess and compare the role of the African Union (AU), the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), the Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS), and the Southern African Development Community (SADC).

This book was based on a special issue of African Security.

Problematizing Regional Organizations in African Security

Fredrik Söderbaum and Rodrigo Tavares

School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden and United Nations University Comparative Regional Integration Studies, Bruges, Belgium

ABSTRACT. The African continent is plagued by some of the most brutal and violent conflicts in the world. At the same time that warfare is changing, so has the state’s capacity to provide security and political stability to its citizens. In this context, what is the role of new conflict management actors, in particular regional organizations? This article starts out by situating conflicts and peace operations on the African continent. It then moves on to problematize the role of regional organizations in African security with emphasis on three key topics: (1) the advantages and disadvantages of African regional and subregional organizations vis-à-vis other security mechanisms, in particular UN peace operations; (2) the official and unofficial reasons to intervene; and (3) whether security is actually protected by the peace activities carried out by the regional organizations.

INTRODUCTION

Some of the most challenging conflicts in the world over the past two decades are found in Africa (e.g., Burundi, Chad, Darfur, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Liberia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Uganda). Despite the varied and complex nature of armed violence on the continent, most share a number of characteristics, which in the literature are sometimes referred to as “new wars” in contradistinction to “old wars.”¹

A characteristic of these wars is the new prominence demanded by, and given to, subnational actors and groups like rebel movements and mercenaries who often try to function as though they were recognized members of the international community. The actions of these actors and the nature of these crises have undermined perceptions of the state in Africa as the dominant and significant actor in the international system. These groups have succeeded in introducing new practices into the conduct of armed conflicts, effectively contesting some archetypal conceptions of modern warfare (one reason why some scholars prefer the “new wars” label). Subsequently, the dynamics of these conflicts have also influenced, and indeed transformed, the patterns of subregional and external involvement in, and responses to, such crises. This has at least two important implications.

First, in many of these wars and conflicts, the distinction between combatants and civilians is unclear, as is that between who is “good” and “evil,” “friend” and “foe,” because loyalties are quickly changing. Second, even if most contemporary conflicts in Africa are often defined as “domestic,” they are deeply embedded in a regional and cross-border context. As illustrated by the cases in Liberia, Sierra Leone, the DRC, and more recently Sudan/Chad, most conflicts on the African continent spill over into neighboring countries or draw regional actors into what is often better understood as “regional war zones.” Although the Uppsala Conflict Database shows that the number of armed conflicts in Africa is decreasing (from 18 conflicts in 1999, to 12 in 2008),² the striking feature of African warfare is the regionalization of conflict.³

When the international community does intervene to mitigate armed struggles—most often in the form of a United Nations peacekeeping mission—the results have been mixed. Most of the difficulties are connected to the heterogeneity and complexity of conflict in Africa. During the Cold War, most conflicts in Africa followed the systemic logic of that order. They formed part of the bipolar struggle or were “solved” by way of interventions from superpowers, former colonial powers, or powerful neighbors. However, in the post–Cold War era a new pattern has emerged whereby conflicts are allowed to erupt (often erratically) and also continue, waiting for more appropriate solutions. In this regard, some peace operations have succeeded, while many others have failed to quell violence or restore order in the countries to which they were deployed. Presently, the UN leads (or co-leads) eight peace operations in Africa (Burundi, Côte d’Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Liberia, Western Sahara, Central African Republic/Chad, Darfur, and Sudan). In total, there have been twenty-six UN peacekeeping missions in Africa since 1948.

Despite the increasing UN presence in Africa, over the past decade there has been another notable peacekeeping trend: regional peacekeeping, which has emerged for several reasons. One reason is the aforementioned pattern of the regionalization of conflict, which calls for the intervention of regional organizations and/or neighboring countries to address their common regional problem. Another reason is the weakness of the UN system to come up with relevant solutions. It is clear today that the UN has neither enough resources nor the political will to engage with all security problems, hence the growing concern for security regionalism. As Haas already pointed out at the end of the Cold War, “regional security arrangements grow in direct proportion to disappointment with the UN collective security system.”⁴ According to Chapter VIII of the United Nations Charter, regional arrangements and agencies⁵ can, and have been, empowered to engage in regional conflicts. Indeed, today the debate between the comparative advantages of either the UN or regional organizations to address violent conflicts has emerged among policymakers as well as in the research community as one of the most important issues in the global security architecture.

How does this debate apply to Africa? Over the past two decades the continent has provided the testing ground for major regional peacekeeping interventions. Peacekeeping operations have been deployed by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) in Liberia (1990–1998 and 2003), Sierra Leone (1997–2000), Guinea Bissau (1998–1999), and Côte D’Ivoire (2003–2004); the Southern African Development Community (SADC) in Lesotho (1998) and Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) (1998); the Economic and Monetary Community of Central Africa (CEMAC) in the Central African Republic (2002–2008); the Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS) also in the Central African Republic (2008–); and, finally, the AU in Burundi (2003–2004 and 2007–), Sudan (2004–2007), Somalia (since 2007), and Comoros (2006 and 2008). Inter-governmental Authority on Development (IGAD) also has experience in peacemaking in Sudan and Somalia.

Moreover, African leaders have been leading the way in the establishment of regional mechanisms to handle peace and security issues. The creation of the African Peace and Security Architecture (APSA) in 2002 is perhaps the most important development in the security field during the past decade. In addition to creating the necessary decision-making bodies in Addis Ababa, such as the Peace and Security Council, the Military Staff Committee, and the Panel of the Wise, APSA will be comprised of the African Stand-by Force (ASF) based on five regional brigades to be established by each of the subregional organizations (ECOWAS, SADC, IGAD, ECCAS, and Arab Maghreb Union [UMA]). The setting up of the regional brigades, in compliance with the African security architecture framework, has to accommodate—often with some difficulties—the existing peace and security schemes that have been developed by these very same regional organizations.

When the African heads of state and government decided to reshape the Organization of African Unity (OAU) into the African Union (AU), one of the main impetuses behind the transformation was the declared will to tackle “African problems through African solutions.” This vision has also been forcefully supported by the international community, in particular Western powers. There exist, however, fundamental differences of outlook and style among the regional organizations, reflecting different perceptions of threat, historical experience, and cultural background, with correspondingly different strategies toward the maintenance of peace and security.

This special issue is motivated by the fact that the role of African regional organizations in conflict prevention, peacekeeping, and peacebuilding still remains an underresearched topic. We argue that the determination with which the international community has delegated power to regional organizations has not been matched by a thorough understanding of this process. The article gives prominence to some key questions that hitherto have not received enough systematic and comparative treatment in the debate: (1) the advantages and disadvantages of African regional and subregional organizations vis-à-vis other security mechanisms, in particular UN peace operations; (2) the interaction between the “official” versions to intervene and the underlying interests of involved actors; and (3) whether security is actually protected by these organizations. Before problematizing these three issues in detail, it is necessary to situate security regionalism in a wider conceptual and theoretical context.

DEBATES ABOUT SECURITY REGIONALISM⁶

Regionalism and security can be related in many different ways. One has to do with the choice of unit of investigation—for example, a regional security complex—defined by Barry Buzan as “a group of states whose primary security concerns link together sufficiently closely that their national security cannot realistically be considered apart from one another.”⁷ The concept has been rethought in a multisectoral and constructivist direction, making the actual delimitation of the unit more nuanced but not easier since different security sectors (economic, environmental, societal) may define different regions.⁸ The idea of securitization further adds to the fluency of the concept.⁹

In an alternative approach developed by Lake and Morgan, regions are defined in terms of the mode of security management or “regional order.”¹⁰ Regional orders can shift from simple balance of power systems or concerts to more comprehensive communities or integrated polities. Lake and Morgan suggest an alternative definition of regional security complex: “the states affected by at least one transborder but local security externality.”¹¹ More recently, Tavares suggested that the regional unit of analysis should be defined by its content and proposed the idea of regional peace and security clusters (RPSC), defined as a set of peace and security relations that occur in a broad territory (region), driven by agents, operating at various levels of regional integration, who use various instruments to change the patterns of security, conflict, and positive peace.¹²

Another link between regionalism and security concerns the regional implications of a local conflict. These depend on the nature of the security complex and the way various security problems are vertically and horizontally linked in particular regions, which can be highly varying. Most and Starr have demonstrated, with substantial empirical data, that if a war begins on a nation’s border, that nation might then become involved in a new military conflict depending on the perceived changes in the nation’s vulnerability, uncertainty, risks, and the opportunities that accompany the onset of the military conflict. In general, they assume that the likelihood of diffusion is particularly high among states in a region because such states interact more extensively than other states.¹³

The regionalization of conflict is tightly connected to the third link: the role of the region for regional security, conflict management, and peacebuilding. That there may often be a role for regional cooperation in the case a conflict has spread within a region is more or less self-evident. However, it has also become increasingly evident during recent decades that many so called “national” or “domestic” conflicts can be understood and dealt with only in their regional contexts.¹⁴ This is particularly the case in Africa.

Indeed, with the rise of so-called “new regionalism” in recent decades, regional organizations have become actors in their own right. A number of them—including AU, Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), ECOWAS, EU, and SADC—have acquired some kind of institutionalized mechanism for conflict management and regional peacekeeping. Regions, through their regional agencies, have transformed from objects into subjects, making their relationship to the UN much more complex than current policy and academic debates tend to recognize. This leads us to the first of the three key issues.

REGIONAL ORGANIZATIONS VERSUS OTHER SECURITY MECHANISMS

Most observers claim that the UN constitutes the foundation of a rules-based world order. Go-it-alone strategies outside of a UN framework—for instance, through NATO plurilateralism or U.S. unilateralism—are anathema.¹⁵ Regionalism constitutes the main rules-based alternative to UN–based multilateralism, and its role has been intensively discussed at various junctures during the past century. Yet, even if the UN Secretary-General’s reports, In Larger Freedom (2005)¹⁶ or A Regional-Global Security Partnership: Challenges and Opportunities (2006), both conclude that multilateralism and regionalism can be complementary; the prevailing belief is that “UN primacy must be kept in all cases.”¹⁷ This is the vision enshrined in the UN charter. It authorizes the regional bodies to engage with pacific settlement of local disputes (Art. 52), including traditional peacekeeping (Chapter VI), before referring them to the Security Council, or with peace enforcement (robust peacekeeping) after Security Council authorization (Art. 53). In this conception, the region is simply an intermediate actor that undertakes tasks determined at and delegated from the multilateral level. The main purpose of regional agencies, according to this perspective, is to contribute to a multilateral system controlled by the UN Security Council.

Some proponents of this line have certainly developed greater recognition of the role of regional organizations. Ramesh Thakur, for instance, has acknowledged that there is an increasing gap between legality and legitimacy in multilateralism and that the UN cannot deliver a legitimate world order on its own. Regional arrangements closer to home can in this view counter perceptions of “external imposition” by a distant global UN. Yet this approach stresses that, to be legitimate, such regionalism must be compatible with and contribute to UN–based multilateralism. For Thakur, regional organizations can fill some of the gaps within multilateralism, but they must do so within the UN framework.¹⁸ In other words, it is a vertical order whereby multilateral sanction is necessary for regional interventions to be legal and fully legitimate.

However, contemporary realities of global politics do not accommodate this idealized hierarchical order. Emerging regional formations assume a degree of actor capacity that traditional regional agencies lacked when the UN charter was drafted. For example, whereas the Charter of the Organization of American States (OAS), signed in 1948, mentions that the organization is a regional agency for UN purposes (Chapter VIII), the AU’s right to intervene is somehow disassociat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• 1. Problematizing Regional Organizations in African Security
• 2. The African Union’s New Peace and Security Architecture: Toward an Evolving Security Regime?
• 3. The African Union’s Peace Operations: A Comparative Analysis
• 4. Economic Community of West African States on the Ground: Comparing Peacekeeping in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea Bissau, and Côte D’Ivoire
• 5. Inter-governmental Authority on Development on the Ground: Comparing Interventions in Sudan and Somalia
• 6. Regional Conflict Management in Central Africa: From FOMUC to MICOPAX
• 7. Southern African Development Community as Regional Peacekeeper: Myth or Reality?
• 8. Regional Organizations in African Security: A Practitioner’s View
• 9. Regional Organizations and African Security: Moving the Debate Forward
• Index