Spatializing Practices of Regional Organizations during Conflict Intervention

The Politics of ECOWAS and the African Union

Jens Herpolsheimer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000364217
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: African Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book studies relevant actors and practices of conflict intervention by African regional organizations and their intimate connection to space-making, addressing a major gap regarding what actually happens within and around these organizations.

Based on extensive empirical research, it argues that those intervention practices are essentially spatializing practices, based on particular spatial imaginations, contributing to the continuous construction and formatting of regional spaces as well as to ordering relations between different regional spaces. Analyzing the field of developing practices of conflict intervention by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and the African Union (AU), the book contributes a new theory-oriented analytical approach to study African regional organizations (ROs) and the complex dynamics of African peace and security, based on insights from Critical Geography. As such, it helps to close an empirical gap with regard to the 'internal' modes of operation of African ROs as well as the lack of their theorization. It demonstrates that, contrary to most accounts, intervention practices of African ROs have been diverse and complexly interrelated, involving different actors within and around these organizations, and are essentially tied to the space-making.

This book will be of key interest to students and scholars of African Politics, Governance, Peace and Security Studies, International or Regional Organizations and more broadly to Comparative Regionalism, International Relations and International Studies.

1

Introduction

Spatializing practices in AU and ECOWAS interventions

Introduction

Since the late 1990s, African regional organizations (ROs) have emerged as key actors, responding to violent conflicts on the African continent – famously framed as ‘African solutions to African problems’ (among many, e.g., Mays 2003; Coleman 2011; Abatan and Spies 2016). International policy makers, practitioners and academics have hailed them as the missing link in an emerging global ‘architecture’ for peace and security. During the 1990s, they appeared as a possible answer to serious problems in the UN peacekeeping system. Since then, African ROs have been important, in particular in situations and operations in which the UN and Western states have been unwilling or unable to risk the lives of their own personnel or citizens, but also as a ‘laboratory’ for peacekeeping norms and practices (Tardy and Wyss 2014, 1–4).

Two African ROs have especially stood out in this regard: the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and the African Union (AU), which became the successor organization of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) in 2002. Since the early 1990s, both organizations have developed elaborate legal foundations, normative frameworks and operational mechanisms to deal with conflict in their respective regions. What is more, both have repeatedly deployed peacekeeping forces to some of the most violent conflicts in Africa (e.g., Liberia, Sierra Leone, Sudan and Somalia). Testifying to the continued elevated importance of these organizations for peace and security on the continent, but increasingly also beyond it, the UN Secretariat and the EU Commission have developed ever closer relations with both the AU and ECOWAS commissions (e.g., cf. UN DPA 2018; EU Commission 2018; ECOWAS Commission 2018, 2020).

At the same time, African ROs have been the target of harsh and persistent criticism. Most strikingly, this has centered on an apparent gap between rhetoric and implementation, between high aspirations and intentions declared in foundational documents, and actual results of ECOWAS and AU conflict management and peacekeeping efforts. Next to a lack of human and material resources and capacity, among other things, observers have criticized the lack of political will on the part of member states, as well as a lack of clear objectives, coordination and adequate leadership (cf. Vines 2013, 106–108). In addition, coordination and cooperation between the AU and the Regional Economic Communities (RECs), which constitute the pillars of the African Peace and Security Architecture (APSA), have been judged insufficient (cf. Vines 2013, 101ff.; see also Nathan et al. 2015).

Here, apparently, high expectations and ambitions have met ‘realities on the ground’ (cf. European Court of Auditors 2018, 33ff.).¹ However, what exactly these ‘realities’ are still evades deeper understanding. While a variety of detailed empirical studies deal with specific conflicts and interventions,² large parts of the academic literature studying African ROs have focused on what these appear (not) to be or what they should be (see below). In contrast, both empirically and theoretically, few scholars have focused on what African ROs actually do or how they do it (i.e., how they ‘work’, cf. Chabal and Daloz 1999). As a result, still very little is known about their ‘internal’ modes of operation in practice.³ In addition, despite ubiquitous spatial references and terminology – e.g., ‘state’, ‘territory’, ‘region’, ‘architecture’, ‘cross-border’, ‘transnational’ – the overwhelming majority of the literature on African Peace and Security has overlooked ‘space’ as an analytical category. Consequently, the connection between conflict intervention and space-making in Africa (and beyond it) remains largely unexplored.⁴

Against this backdrop, this book takes a close look at what happens ‘inside’ African ROs during conflict intervention, asking how different actors at African ROs have intervened in conflict situations and how these interventions have related to space-making. Consequently, studying intervention practices and their spatializing effects, I argue that these are essentially spatializing practices and that only if ‘space’ is included, as an analytical category, is it possible to make sense more fully of the complex dynamics developing around conflict intervention in Africa. The spatial approach developed to this end offers a new theory-oriented analytical lens that productively bridges insights from International Relations (IR), International Studies, Global Studies and Critical Geography. Therefore, in this book, space is conceptualized as socially constructed and relational. It is the result of multiple, heterogeneous and continuous interactions and social interrelations between different actors, but is also a category of thought that enables sense-making and meaning-making and allows people to act upon and change social ‘realities’. In this way, space is always political, involving relations of power, and politics are often spatial (cf. Massey 2005, 9; discussed in more detail in Chapter 2).

Empirically, the book comprises an in-depth study of intervention practices of ECOWAS and AU actors in response to various conflict situations in their respective regions, with special emphasis on their interventions in Guinea-Bissau. The example of the latter, so far underrepresented in scholarly literature, provides a unique prism to engage with the developing field of practices of conflict intervention by African ROs. Combined with a comprehensive review of official ECOWAS and AU documents, it demonstrates that, contrary to most accounts, intervention practices of African ROs have been diverse and complexly interrelated, involving different kinds of actors, and are essentially tied to space-making.

To the partly overlapping fields of IR, International Studies and Global Studies, this book contributes by both narrowing down an empirical gap, specifically regarding African actors and African agency ‘within’ African ROs as well as between different African ROs and other regional and international actors, reflecting upon their ‘internal’ modes of operation and complex interactions in African peace and security dynamics. At the same time, the spatial approach employed to this end also allows us to theorize how, especially during conflict interventions, different actors make space, specifically ‘regions’, at different, interconnected sites, using different practices. Thereby, this book contributes to a better understanding of the roles of African ROs, and different actors therein, in pursuing specific regionalisms (i.e., spatial-political projects) as part of ‘regional’ and ‘trans-regional’ (if not ‘global’) ordering efforts.

Setting the stage for this endeavor, the remainder of this introduction first reviews the state of the art before, second, further explaining and substantiating the main argument of the book. Subsequently, it reflects upon sources, methods and methodological challenges, before introducing the prism, interventions in Guinea-Bissau following the coup d’état in April 2012, that allows me to study basic sets of ECOWAS and AU intervention practices in detail. Finally, it provides an outline of the remaining chapters.

The contours of African Peace and Security as a research field

African Peace and Security denotes a developing interdisciplinary research field that has the African Peace and Security Architecture (APSA) as its central reference point and specifically studies the role of African ROs therein, along with several other actors, including, for example, different self-identified ‘African’ and ‘non-African’ state actors, civil society organizations and think tanks. While drawing on and often relating to academic literature on UN peacekeeping and/or peacebuilding, scholars of African Peace and Security pursue a specific interest in African actors and African agency.

Despite offering valuable insights, large parts of the existing literature in that field can be described by three interrelated characteristics, which have come to limit a more in-depth understanding of African ROs in African peace and security dynamics – especially, however, during conflict interventions. First, due to a very practical orientation, much of this literature has been primarily descriptive and to some extent also prescriptive. Second, and closely related, while often based in conventional IR approaches, the overwhelming majority of this literature has remained largely disconnected from theoretical debates in IR and International Studies (cf. Tieku, Obi and Scorgie-Porter 2014, 4; Tieku 2019b, 3), especially more recent innovative approaches. Third, many contributions treat African ROs either as unitary actors or as solely driven by their member states, all while overly focusing on military peacekeeping. The following considerations briefly reflect upon the contributions and limitations of existing research, in line with the empirical focus of this book, primarily focusing on literature dealing with ECOWAS and the AU.⁵

Practical orientation, descriptive and prescriptive literature

To date, large parts of the extensive body of literature on conflict interventions by African ROs are primarily descriptive. Many contributions provide information on the formal setup and mandate of African ROs in peace and security. Therefore, the institutional setup of the AU and the African Peace and Security Architecture, its legal and normative framework and its state of implementation, including some significant achievements as well as key problems, are well known (e.g., Engel and Porto 2010, 2014; Vines 2013; Bah et al. 2014; Makinda, Okumu and Mickler 2016; Dersso 2016a). The same applies to the ‘security architecture’ of ECOWAS (e.g., Bah 2005; Hartmann 2010; Bolaji 2011; Cowell 2011; Iwilade and Agbo 2012; Maiangwa 2016). In addition, an enormous amount of scholarly literature has dealt with the operationalization of the African Standby Force, and the different African or African-led peacekeeping missions (e.g., Tardy and Wyss 2014; de Coning, Gelot and Karlsrud 2016; Darkwa 2017; Onditi and Okoth 2017), as well as the missions of the ECOWAS Cease-fire Monitoring Group (ECOMOG) and its successor the ECOWAS Standby Force (ESF) (e.g., Adebajo 2002b; Kabia 2009; Obi 2009; Arthur 2010; Jaye 2016). In this, UN–AU and UN–RO relations in peacekeeping in Africa have also received much attention (e.g., Aning 2005; Boulden 2013; Williams and Boutellis 2014).

In addition, much of the descriptive literature has a very strong practical orientation, mostly concerned with ‘problem solving’. On the one hand this is due to the fact that contributions are either produced by ‘think tanks’ (among many more, e.g., ACCORD, ISS, KAIPTC, DCAF, ECDPM, ICG, IPI),⁶ whose organizational mandates are primarily concerned with policy advice.⁷ On the other hand, many of the scholars that publish in academic journals or edited volumes hold ‘double identities’ as academic researchers and practitioners or consultants, working or having worked for (or with) one or several organizations that they write about. Therefore, their publications have often aimed to provide recommendations and policy advice, as well (e.g., Aning and Atuobi 2009; Cravinho 2009; Wane et al. 2010; Bah et al. 2014). Consequently, evaluations and assessments have often resulted in binary constructions such as ‘success’ or ‘failure’, ‘challenges’ and ‘potentials’. Moreover, many of these studies are implicitly or explicitly normative and prescriptive. While sometimes providing a lot of empirical details, these publications have been concerned more with what African ROs are not or are not doing (i.e., apparent ‘deficits’ and ‘dysfunctions’), as well as what African ROs should or should not be doing, and how to ‘fix’ them. They have given much less attention to what they actually do and how they do it.

In other words, this literature has reached its limits in explaining and theorizing how exactly different regional actors operate in (everyday) practice, especially beyond formal procedures and military peacekeeping, and how this translates into conflict intervention practices and specific outcomes of policy implementation, which are often mixed and sometimes surprising (e.g., cf. Engel 2017b). Moreover, how exactly African ROs interact with each other, as well as with other ROs or international actors, remains under-researched. In particular, how these relations actually play out in practice, and how they are continuously contested and renegotiated, is still insufficiently understood. Finally, despite pervasive spatial references, such as, for example, ‘state’, ‘region’ and ‘architecture’, these accounts hardly reflect on the rol...